It was all happening so quickly that Lucy had no time to sit down and think about everything. There was the packing to be done, a small, conservative trousseau to be ordered, things to be bought. She did it all without any help, stubbornly refusing the tentative overtures of friendship from Sally and her former friends, feeling that the only way to get through all of this was to stand alone and pit herself against the world. She didn’t want to forgive Sally for her gossiping or the others for their snubs—no, it felt much better to grind her resentment between her teeth and chew on it a while.
On her last day spent in the home she grew up in, Lucy walked around aimlessly from room to room, her eyes alighting on the things that were the most familiar and precious to her. Most of what she would take with her had already been packed in trunks and boxes, which at this moment were being taken to Heath’s place by her father. The rooms looked empty without her knickknacks and possessions strewn about, and she wondered if her father would see that. If he did notice how bare the house was without her, he would never say so. It was not in his nature to say things like that.
She stopped in front of the mantelpiece, looking at all the odds and ends lined up on it. A little china figurine was perched on the edge, nearly ready to topple off. The faded figurine was a woman wearing an old-fashioned, high-waisted dress, her slippers and sash painted a shade of gold that had almost been rubbed away by age and handling. It had belonged to her mother. Lucy realized that she had nothing of her mother’s to take with her. She reached out hesitantly, rescuing the figurine from the uncertain balance and clasping it firmly in a small fist. Feeling as if she were stealing something she had no right to, Lucy wrapped it in a handkerchief and closed it in her handbag. What would Anne Caldwell have thought about all of this? Would she have been heartbroken that her daughter was marrying a Southerner? Maybe not. Anne had gone against her own family and married a man they hadn’t approved of. Maybe she would have understood.
Lucy sat down at her father’s rolltop desk, toying absently with a stack of letter paper as she allowed herself to think about Heath for the first time in days. She hadn’t seen nor heard from him personally since that crazy, disjointed night a week ago when she had accepted his proposal. She wondered what his reaction would be as he helped her father unload her boxes and trunks from the wagon. The small house would be improved a good deal by the things she had sent over—the blue and white china, the bright patchwork quilts, the expertly stitched sheets and embroidered cloths that she had made for her hope chest in the expectation that they were for her home with Daniel. A misguided hope chest. She did hope that she hadn’t embroidered a big C for Collier on anything.
A sudden thought struck her, and she pulled a sheet of paper off the top of the stack. Carefully she wrote Lucy Caldwell across the center, then right below it, Lucy Rayne. Perhaps Lucy Caldwell Rayne? No, the shorter version was better, more dashing. It wasn’t a bad name, she thought, staring at the piece of paper intently. It wasn’t bad at all. As she crumpled the paper in a closing fist, she dropped her head in her arms and cried.
On the afternoon of her wedding Lucy stood in front of the mirror in her pink and white dress, twisting and turning to see herself from every angle. She had taken all morning to get dressed, and arrange her hair, but no amount of pinching could bring color to her pale cheeks. There was nothing she could do to make herself appear radiant or joyful, not when her heart was numb and her whole body filled with dread. She heard her father’s knock on the door—he always knocked timidly with just one knuckle of his hand. “Come in,” she said tautly, her nerves already in shreds. Lucas was dressed in a light tan sack suit, his white mustache freshly groomed and waxed.
“You look very attractive,” he said.
“I look more like a bridesmaid than a bride.”
He made no comment about Lucy’s sharp tone, choosing instead to rock back on his heels and give her another appraising glance. “Are you going to wear a veil?”
“I decided not to.” It had been a decision that she now regretted fiercely. It would have been nice to have her face covered, to look out at everyone else and know that they couldn’t see her.
“It’s better this way,” Lucas agreed mildly, then turned to leave the room. “We must leave in five minutes.”
“That’s fine. I’m ready,” she heard herself say, while that little nagging voice in her head chimed in: I’m not ready! I’m not!
She was trapped. There was nothing she could think of to do except follow the course she had set for herself. But other people had done this very same thing. Others had married people they didn’t love, and if she wasn’t going to have Daniel, she might as well have anyone.
As they went in a small carriage to the church, Lucas cleared his throat and spoke to her with unusual awkwardness. “Lucy . . . when a girl is married, it falls to her mother or some female relative to speak to her about the . . . the marital relationship. Notwithstanding what you may have already . . . experienced . . . there are things that a bride should be aware of. I trust you took my advice and spoke to the reverend about any questions you may have had?”
Lucy noticed that her father’s face was even redder than hers. Now he asked her such a question, ten minutes before her wedding ceremony, when he knew there was no time for her to ask the kind of personal questions he would have hated to answer. “I did speak to him,” she said, her eyes falling to the small bouquet of flowers in her hand. “He gave me a list of Bible quotations to read. I looked them up last night, and . . . I think I know everything . . . mostly.”
“That’s good,” he said with obvious relief, and the subject was promptly dropped.
Lucy frowned down at her flowers. In truth, the Scriptures had not been as enlightening as the reverend had said they would be. There had been a lot of passages with advice to “be obedient” and “be fruitful” and, of course, “be faithful”; but the material was sadly lacking in the specifics she would have liked to know.
She had drawn her own conclusions about marriage from her own experiences, some common sense, and some gleanings from Godey’s Lady’s Book. The novelettes wedged between the “chitchat” section and the fashion columns had given a clue here and there about what to expect. There was, for instance, that thrilling paragraph in “Philomena’s Dilemma,” in which the hero had kissed Philomena with ardent vigor and “clasped her to his breast,” thereafter “bringing Philomena to the true realization of womanhood.” Lucy had a fair idea of what had happened to Philomena after the hero had clasped her in his arms. After all, it was impossible for men to hide what happened to them when they held you too close for too long. And thanks to Heath Rayne, she also knew without a doubt what happened at the beginning of the wedding night, if not the middle and end. Picturing the two of them alone in his bed, she felt her insides clench up.
The reverend, his plump, smile-bedecked wife, and his little girl were waiting with Heath just inside the front door of the church. Lucy preceded her father through the doorway and stopped in front of her husband-to-be, looking up at him with trepidation. He was very handsome in a fawn linen suit that had the look, as all of his clothes did, of being unspeakably expensive. The suit was superbly cut and fitted; it was flat collared and had stylishly made sleeves without cuffs. Everything was perfect from the top of his dark blond head to the polished side-buttoned shoes on his feet. More annoying than his flawless appearance was his relaxed manner—he was as casual as if they were at a picnic! The way he looked at her gave the impression that he knew how anxious she was and that he was silently daring her to go through with the wedding. I’ll bet he thinks I’m going to back out like a coward, she thought, and set her jaw determinedly.
As they all walked to the front of the empty church and took their places, it was clear that everyone except Heath was nervous. Even the Reverend Mr. Reynolds, who had done this hundreds of times, had to take off his glasses and wipe the perspiration from the foggy lenses.
“Is there something wrong
, sir?” Heath inquired politely.
“I’ve . . . never married a Southerner before,” came the apologetic answer, which suddenly infuriated Lucy. For heaven’s sake, why did everyone keep saying Southerner as if she were marrying some different species of man?
“That’s all right,” Lucy said acidly. “I assume they use the same vows as we do, Reverend, even if they don’t pronounce the words right.”
It took all of Heath’s concentration to smother a grin. For a spoiled and pampered New England girl, Lucy Caldwell had done pretty well at raising her back up and showing signs of a fine temper. He was more than a little relieved to see that she hadn’t let them all humble her spirit, for he couldn’t stand the thought of a meek and submissive wife. On the other hand, it amused him to a certain extent to know how it galled her to marry him instead of her fine Northern beau from a well-respected family. She was a little hypocrite, he thought with a grim smile. If he had been from an old Boston family with an established name, she would have dropped Daniel Collier and leapt on him in a minute. The attraction between them had been there from the first moment they had met, though it would take some doing to get her to admit it.
Now Lucy was looking up at him, challenging him to say something about her shrewish manner, but he merely smiled and shrugged, as if he had already resigned himself to the odd ways of Yankees.
Lucy clung to her irritation for the next several minutes, finding that it helped to take her mind off what was happening. Just as her grand wedding dress had been reduced to a far simpler and more modest garment, her grand wedding had been reduced to a short and businesslike ceremony. The vows were taken; then, the rings were exchanged during an enthusiastic bout of organ music provided by the reverend’s wife. Lucy barely had time to register the rich gold band around her finger before she felt Heath’s fingers under her chin, tilting her face upwards. He kissed her lightly.
There. It was done. Her dreams of Daniel were forever gone. Her pledge was given to another man, and her hand was placed in a stranger’s keeping. While Heath accepted the reverend’s congratulations, Lucas Caldwell left the church to bring round the carriage. Lucy bent to the little Reynolds girl to give her the bouquet, and her fingers brushed against the tiny, warm hands that clutched the flower stems. Then she straightened and looked at Mrs. Reynolds, whose round face was touched with gentle pity as she saw what was written in Lucy’s eyes. “A bride shouldn’t wear such a frown, dear,” she whispered kindly. “He seems like a fine man who’ll do well by you.”
Lucy nodded mutely, a lump of misery rising in her throat as the woman continued.
“Life isn’t always what we expect it to—”
“I understand. Thank you, Mrs. Reynolds,” Lucy interrupted more harshly than she had intended, her rudeness freezing the other woman into silence. Suddenly she felt the warning bite of Heath’s hand, closing like a vise on her upper arm. Wincing slightly, she glanced up at him in protest, but he was directing a charming smile to Mrs. Reynolds. “We both appreciate your kindness to us this afternoon, ma’am,” he said in that beguiling drawl, smoothing down the older woman’s ruffled feathers. Lucy didn’t understand why he took the trouble—it didn’t really matter to him what Mrs. Reynolds thought, did it? “We’ll never forget what you’ve done to make this occasion a beautiful memory that we’ll always cherish.”
“Why, Mr. Rayne,” fluttered the reverend’s wife, her expression self-preening and pleased, “all I did was play a hymn and witness the ceremony—”
“And bless us with your presence.” Heath gave her a slow, appreciative smile, which no doubt established a storehouse of good will in Mrs. Reynolds’ ample bosom. Then he turned Lucy with a twist of his wrist and steered her down the aisle.
“You’re going to bruise my arm,” she hissed under her breath, prying at his fingers until they loosened. He did not miss a stride, continuing to pull her out of the church.
“If you’ve got a crow to pluck with me, Daniel, or your father, that’s one thing, but you don’t have to spite some nice old woman who was trying to coax you into a better mood—”
“Crow to pluck?” she repeated disdainfully. “You mean bone to pick.”
“You Yankees might pick bones, but south of the Mason-Dixon we pluck crows.”
“At the moment we’re not south of the Mason-Dixon!”
They paused in front of the carriage, and blue eyes met brown in one nerve-jarring moment. Gradually Lucy’s gaze dropped. “Are we going home now?” she asked in a low voice.
“I thought it would be best to go to the Wayside Inn for dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Heath sighed, his patience worn thin. He raked a hand through his golden hair, causing it to fall over his forehead in attractive disarray. “Cinda . . . since this is the only wedding day that either of us is likely to have, let’s try to make the best of it. We’ll go to the Wayside, have a relaxing dinner with a glass or two of wine, and by the time we come back to Concord everything will be unpacked—”
“By who?”
“A woman named Colleen Flannery and her daughter Molly—I pay them to do the washing and cooking a few times a week. They’ll come by tomorrow to meet you.”
She nodded slowly and let him help her into the carriage. Now that the ceremony was over, Lucy was tired, strung out, and even more tense than she had been this morning. She tried to do her best to carry on a conversation, but after a while they both lapsed into wordlessness. The next part of the evening went by in a blur while the silence between them lasted all through dinner, broken only by the necessities of ordering from the menu and passing the salt. After a second glass of wine, however, Lucy’s tongue was loosened sufficiently for her to ask some questions that had been bothering her.
“Are you going to write another book?” she asked.
“Hadn’t planned on it. Why do you ask?”
“Well . . . money for us to live on. I mean, the money from your first book can’t last forever, and I thought to make more, you’d have to—”
“Oh.” His turquoise eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. “A man should try to make a living as an author only if he doesn’t value the luxury of eating three meals a day.”
“But your book was a success—”
“Yes, but the total amount of money I got for it wouldn’t last us a week.”
Her jaw dropped open in amazement. Her father had said Heath could provide for her! It had never entered her mind to doubt that, not when Heath’s clothes were so handsome and his expression always so free of worry.
“But I had always assumed . . . then how do you make a living?”
“After the war ended I sold some of the more valuable tracts of land that my father left to me and made some investments. One in particular promises to pay off very well, more than enough to keep us in a comfortable style. Have you ever heard of refrigerated railroad cars?”
“No,” she said, relaxing with sudden relief. Land. Investments. Those words meant money.
“It’s a way for the big shippers to increase their business ten times over, packing their fruit and vegetables in low-temperature cars and sending them on down the line to the larger retailers, bypassing the small merchants along the tracks—”
“But wouldn’t that put a lot of people out of business?”
“Yes. But that can’t be helped . . . especially when they’re standing in the way of progress.”
“How callous you sound! Don’t you feel guilty about it? Responsible for those people you put out of work?”
“I should have known you’d moralize about it,” Heath said, and smiled slightly. But as she continued to stare at him in that half-appalled manner, his smile disappeared and his expression became at once sober and ruthless. What kinds of things was he capable of? “No, I don’t feel guilty,” he said. “I don’t like putting people out of work, but I have a strange fondness for sleeping with a roof over my head.”
“But those people—”
“
That’s what war does . . . it shakes the established order up. Some of us rise while others sink to the bottom. And no matter what I’ve had to do to keep from going under, it’s better than drowning.”
“Some men would rather drown than lose their integrity,” Lucy said. Censure threaded thickly through her voice.
Heath’s blue eyes turned to ice, sending a shiver down her spine. “You’d be surprised, Mrs. Rayne, about the amount of things you don’t know about men and their integrity. Including the fact that during the war your beloved Daniel probably did things to survive that would make you sick to your stomach.”
“I didn’t say a word about Daniel! ” she said hotly, but they both knew she had been thinking about him.
“I’ll tolerate a lot from you,” Heath said, staring her down effortlessly, “but I won’t have you sitting in judgment on me—or making comparisons.”
After that they didn’t talk at all, but this silence, cold and unbreakable, was worse than the one before.
After supper was over, they returned to Concord late in the evening. Lucy had a few minutes alone before they retired to bed. Carefully she took off her dress and put it away. All her movements were slow, as if she were in the middle of a dream. Clumsily she undid her corset and swayed as a deep breath of air rushed to the bottom of her lungs. Clinging to the bedpost, she rested her cheek against it and closed her eyes until the dizziness passed.
“Cinda?” She started in response to Heath’s voice and her eyes flew open. “Are you all right?” he asked, walking from the doorway to the bed. His handsome face was touched with concern. Letting go of the bedpost, she backed away a step or two, her bare toes digging into the pliant braided rug.