After the Wedding

by Courtney Milan

  Gentleness of spirit. Camilla let these words wash over her.

  “You know,” Mrs. Singh said, “he took over here first when he was fifteen. Harvil…well, for historical reasons, the china-works here has offered employment to every sort of person, regardless of race. Sailors who were left in port, Chinamen who hoped to do business but fell on hard times… Harvil gave them all a chance.”

  “That sounds very hospitable.”

  Mrs. Singh’s lip curled up. “It does, doesn’t it? In reality, when Adrian arrived, the community was divided five ways. Nobody took him seriously. He was a fifteen-year-old boy and his family owned the place. It should have been a disaster. But he didn’t issue orders. He didn’t take charge. He didn’t tell us all what to do. He just…listened, and then somehow…?” She shrugged. “I can’t quite explain it myself. There are some people who are popular because they tell you you’re allowed to be the worst version of yourself. And then there’s Adrian.”

  “He makes you want to be your best.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Singh shrugged. “And when you aren’t, he makes you want to be better without telling you how you’ve failed. As I said. We’re very protective of him.”

  * * *

  By the time Adrian arrived, the meeting was in full swing—which was to say, the artists were all arguing. As usual.

  Tea stood on a sideboard; he made himself a cup and listened.

  “I know you are capable of delicacy of principle,” Mrs. Song was saying, “but here—look at this abysmal glut of color! No spareness of design. No sense of balance! There must be room to breathe in art. I would honestly rather gouge my own eyes out with a pitchfork than look at what you’ve done!”

  “Well,” Mr. Alabi shot back. “We can’t all design perfectly white plates with dots on them, can we?”

  “It is a bear cub, not a dot!”

  Beside them, Mr. Namdak chuckled. The two artists froze as one, turned to him, and frowned.

  “What are you laughing about?”

  “Yes, really,” Mrs. Song put in, one hand drifting to her hip, “what are those…things you’ve rendered? Are they stars? Are they flowers? Are they fish? Are they cat paws?”

  “Actually, they’re stylized representations of—”

  “Stylized?” Mrs. Song made a face. “You call that style?”

  When Adrian had been fifteen and newly alone in England, he had tried to do his part by taking over his father’s work at Harvil Industries.

  “You have a good eye,” his father had said. “And we have excellent artists. Just pick the design that is most eye-catching.”

  He had walked into a room of adults arguing, yelling at each other about whose work was better. Back then, the artist picked to design that year’s china would receive a bonus; the others would stew and vow vengeance for the next season.

  Adrian really hadn’t intended to change everything. It had just happened. By the time the war was over, the damage had been done. Which was to say, Harvil Industries had tripled its yearly profits, the system of choosing one artist’s designs had been tossed like so much rubbish, and for some inexplicable reason, the men and women he worked with treated Adrian like an equal, even though he couldn’t even draw.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Mr. Namdak said, rolling his eyes. “We’ve been at this for weeks. We’re desperate for you.”

  “One of these days, you will all realize I don’t do anything at all, and you’ll be rid of me entirely.”

  “You do own the company,” Mr. Alabi muttered.

  “Well, my family does, at any rate.” They only listened to him because they had to. “If it weren’t for that, you’d not rely on me for anything.”

  Mr. Alabi rolled his eyes. “I know what I am good at. I have a better eye for color than any man on this planet.”

  “More humility, too.” Mrs. Song snickered into a fist.

  “I can’t do what you do.”

  “True,” Mrs. Song said. “Only you can change Mr. Alabi’s designs and make him think it’s his idea.”

  “How many times must I tell you? You can’t change the design! It’s telling a story. Adrian, tell her—”

  “A story nobody will understand.” That was Mr. Namdak.

  “All the better! It’s about us—all of us here in Harvil, wanderers dispersed far from homes that no longer exist, coming together, forming new friendships.”

  “It’s messy.” Mrs. Song shook her head.

  “I’m trying to compliment you, you foo—” He stopped, glanced at Adrian, and cleared his throat. “You fine woman.”

  “So what is Mrs. Song in your story?” Mr. Namdak asked. “Is she the angry zig-zaggy pattern?”

  “Boo. Don’t be rude, not unless you want to be the squiggly green lines.”

  Adrian stood. “Well, that’s the problem. If the design is about coming together, then really, Mr. Alabi, you shouldn’t be speaking for everyone.”

  “Why not? I’m so good at it.”

  Adrian ignored this posturing. “What if we used just a ribbon of the design, superimposed over the bear cub?”

  His artists exchanged dubious looks.

  “A larger version of the bear cub.”

  “Like…” Mrs. Song sketched her bear cub swiftly in pencil; Mr. Alabi followed with a few strokes of water color.

  “No.” Everyone spoke at once, almost in horror, at the result.

  “What about…”

  It went on for another hour, then two. Adrian was almost ready to end the session in disgust, when his exhausted brain offered up one last idea. “The silhouette of the cub,” he said. “But…more stylized. And fill it with Alabi’s design.”

  It took another five minutes to sketch this out. Adrian stood, stretching.

  The final result was… No. Not quite right. Maybe it was because a bear’s silhouette was too bulky, but it lacked a certain something. He wasn’t sure what.

  “Like that,” Adrian said, “but maybe with more sense of movement. Maybe if it’s hunting?”

  “Do bears hunt?” asked Mrs. Song.

  “Well, I’m sure they must. How else do they eat?”

  Silence reigned for a handful of seconds. Then Mr. Namdak shrugged. “We’re artists, not…animal behavior experts. I don’t even go outside unless I have no choice in the matter. How should I know?”

  Adrian sighed. “Let’s pretend bears hunt. It’s probably true. Mr. Namdak, maybe it’s trying to catch your dream-star-fish thing?”

  He could feel the excitement growing in the room as they worked, sketching over each other.

  “That’s it.” Mr. Namdak smiled, stepping back. “That’s it. We’ve done it.”

  There were handshakes all around. Adrian stood back and looked, and thought, and…

  “No,” he said, to everyone’s groans. “We haven’t. Not quite. First, we’ve promised an eight plate series. What we have here is one plate at best. And it’s not even fully fleshed out.”

  “An utter tyrant,” Mrs. Song said. “We are employed by a tyrant. And here it is, ten at night.”

  “Second,” Adrian said, “I don’t love the sketch of the bear cub. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but I want more of a sense of play here. This is a cub, not a full-grown animal.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And third, we have this cub catching the—dream-star, whatever it is—on the first plate. That can’t be right. It’s an eight plate series; it ought to tell a full story. You don’t catch your dreams on the first try, after all.”

  “Lots of people do.” Mrs. Song rubbed her eyes. “But I suppose I see your point.”

  “Still, we have a direction.” Adrian smiled. “We have something that is almost a preliminary design. And this is going to be amazing once we’ve finished. Enough for the night.”

  “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Adrian just stared at Mr. Namdak and shook his head. “You literally could have done exactly that. You’re the ones drawing.”

&nb
sp; “Oh, stop being modest and go home,” Mr. Namdak said. “Don’t you have something about an annulment to think about, too?”

  All thought of bears and designs dropped from Adrian’s head. Home. God, home. He had a thousand things to do. The designs needed more work tomorrow, and he still had his uncle to please and an annulment to plan.

  Well.

  He sighed. Good thing there was the rest of the night.

  * * *

  Adrian had expected to find his cottage dark when he returned, and from the outside, it appeared that way. But as he was hanging up his hat and coat, he noticed a dim glow from the study.

  Bemused, he drifted down the hall.

  Camilla sat at a table, a book in front of her. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She bit her lip and found a strand, worrying it between two fingers as she frowned at the book in front of her. The lamp painted her face in gold and brown—a tiger’s palette, he thought.

  “Hello, tigress,” he said aloud.

  She jumped; her hands flew in the air. The pen she’d been holding landed halfway across the table, splattering ink.

  “My God.” She glared at him. “You scared me.”

  “I scared you?” He couldn’t help but smile. “You’re the tiger. Why should I scare you?”

  Her eyes narrowed at him. “Clearly you need to sleep.”

  “Clearly,” he replied, “I need to do nothing of the kind. Why are you still awake?”

  Their eyes met again. He was tired, tired enough that he couldn’t quite summon the willpower to politely look away, as he should. Tired enough that he let his gaze wander down the swell of her breasts to her waist, down past the smooth curve of her hips. She wasn’t wearing shoes, and he could see her ankles. They looked like bronze in the dim light of the lamp.

  “Your feet must be freezing,” he said, and that made him think of kneeling on the floor in front of her, taking her foot in his hand…

  To warm them, of course. Nothing more.

  “Oh, my feet rarely get cold.”

  Ah. Maybe he was not purely selfless, then, because that image didn’t go away.

  She gave him a smile. “It’s one of my best traits.”

  He couldn’t touch her. It wouldn’t be fair to her, dependent on him for everything. It wouldn’t be fair to him, because if he touched her, he would have to stop. He’d known up until now that he thought her attractive. He’d known that he liked her. She was pretty and kind and clever, but she was also legally married to him and no matter how lovely she was, he didn’t want that state to persist.

  He couldn’t touch her. But he wanted to. He wanted it with an ache that was…probably just weariness?

  Right. That was it. Weariness. He’d sleep it off and it would all be better in the morning.

  Except he had too much to do to sleep.

  “Camilla.” He said her name just to say her name.

  “Mmm?”

  Question. He needed to ask her a question. “You didn’t tell me why you were still awake.”

  She blinked at him. “Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? You said we’d have to write questions for Mrs. Martin, to send out tomorrow morning?” She gestured to the paper. “I’ve been doing them.”

  He frowned. He looked at the paper, then at her, then back at the paper. He was tired, and…

  “I should do that.”

  “Too late.” She smiled. “I’m almost finished.”

  “You don’t really care about the annulment the way I do,” he told her, “and it doesn’t seem fair that you should have to, under the circumstances… It’s not really a bother. I can handle one more thing.”

  She stood. She took a step toward him, and his breath froze in his chest. “You tell yourself that a lot, don’t you? That you can take on one more thing?”

  “Well.” He swallowed as she took a step forward. “I’ve been very lucky in my life. I’ve been given a lot. It seems only fair that I try to do something with what I have, doesn’t it?”

  She took another step toward him. Lit from behind, her expression was impossible to make out.

  “One more thing,” Camilla told him softly. “One more thing. One more thing. Of all the men in the world I could have been forced to marry, it ended up being you. I, too, count myself lucky. This time, let me do one more thing for you.”

  She was close enough to touch now, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t touch her. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair.

  She touched him. She reached out and put her hands on his shoulders. It was only strength of will that kept him from pulling her to him. His hands clenched into fists at his side.

  But it wasn’t that sort of touch she gave him. She pushed him, turning him around so he faced the door away from her. He could feel the palms of her hands in the small of his back.

  “Go to bed,” she said. “I’m almost done. And I don’t have to be up at seven in the morning.”

  She pushed him, and what could he do?

  He couldn’t touch her, so he went. He was almost up to his room, half-exhausted with weariness, when the thought came to him.

  “Oh,” he said, looking into the darkness, feeling as if he had been struck by lightning. “Tigers. Of course it’s tigers.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Camilla had left the draft of the questions she’d written for Mrs. Martin on Adrian’s desk; by the time she came downstairs the next morning, it was gone.

  In its place was a note: Thanks. These were excellent; have sent on. See you tonight?

  There were no other instructions. That left her with nothing to do all day but think—always a dangerous prospect—or walk or read. It was raining; that didn’t bode well for walking.

  Adrian was not much for fiction, she discovered upon perusing his shelves, and he—or rather, his family—had the strangest collection of books. A multi-volume set on the production of pig iron. Seven separate tracts on ecclesiastical law that were well marked. And an entire shelf of books on the chemical composition of various dyes.

  One of the ecclesiastical law books turned out to be a collection of accounts of trials in the ecclesiastical courts. She leafed through them, thoroughly confused by a multitude of words she didn’t know. Another book ended up being a legal dictionary. It proved only slightly helpful, as she didn’t know half the words used in the definitions.

  There were two accounts of annulment proceedings in the first book. The rain was not letting up; she was supposed to be getting an annulment. Why not read through them?

  “How are you getting on?” Adrian asked her that night over dinner.

  “By and by. You?”

  He shrugged, much the same as she had. “Passably. Things are taking shape, I suppose.”

  He didn’t say anything about wanting her input—of course, she realized, they’d need to develop something before she could have an opinion on it—and he seemed sufficiently harried that she did not want to ask.

  Well. She had reading and she had crocheting.

  The days slipped by. She read through the two annulment proceedings in their entirety, once, and then again, and a third time.

  The confusing legalistic language slowly started to feel comprehensible after the fifth read. The outcome of the cases, once she understood them, began to bother her more.

  Miss Jane Leland, an heiress, had been drugged with opium before saying “I do” to a man she had before refused; the courts had refused to grant her an annulment on the grounds that she had insufficiently proven that she did not consent to the opium.

  By contrast, Sir William Tannsy had agreed to marry Lady Catherine Dubois; he had been so nervous at his wedding (or so he claimed) that he had not noticed that her maid, Miss Laney Tabbott, had taken her place and so (he claimed) a fraud had been done on him.

  It didn’t look like fraud to Camilla, not unless Sir William had gravel in place of brains. Sir William was supposed to have married Lady Catherine six weeks later, with the banns already having been read the first time before he
left.

  Sir William had claimed that Miss Tabbott, purporting to be her mistress, had sent him a letter begging him for an immediate Fleet Marriage to calm her nerves.

  There followed pages of text— “legal reasoning,” it was apparently called—that purported to explain that somehow Miss Tabbott had cheated Sir William. Even though her actual real name had been used on the register. Even though he had spent four hours in her company before the ceremony, and not once noticed she was a different person than her mistress. Even though Miss Tabbott stated that Sir William himself had courted her and asked to marry her.

  Tabbott claimed the marriage was consummated, which Sir William denied. The medical examiners claimed that the fact of consummation could not be established.

  Miss Tabbott’s testimony was deemed unbelievable. She had committed fraud, the court said. Annulment granted.

  “What is this utter nonsense?” Camilla found herself demanding at dinner-time, pointing to the book.

  “Oh,” was Mr. Hunter’s bemused reply. He had been frowning at a notebook of sketches as he ate. “You’re reading that? Why?”

  “I am attempting to. I don’t understand it.”

  He glanced over, swiftly scanning the pages in question. “Well, the court is saying that—”

  “Oh, that’s not what I meant. I comprehend the words perfectly now. I just don’t see how any person in their right mind could possibly have come to the conclusion that Sir William was tricked into marriage.”

  “I don’t recall what happened.”

  Camilla was warming to her subject. “As best as I can tell, this absolute rapscallion obtained a marriage license with her actual name on it, told this poor maid that he loved her, had his way with her, and then claimed the marriage wasn’t real and she had tricked him into it! And the ecclesiastical courts agreed!”

  “Mmm.” He nodded.

  “I want to get a stick and beat him.”

  “I support you in your desire for justice, but the case was decided in 1721. He’s probably dead.”

  “Then I want to beat his grave,” Camilla declared. “And it’s worse than that. This is the sort of court that decides if we can have our marriage annulled? They have no sense of justice, no principles. What are we doing, going before them?”