‘I completely understand that you don’t want to be a bridesmaid, honey,’ she had said gently as the hairdresser had teased and smoothed her dark hair around the stunning Montague diamond tiara, ‘but you’re the closest thing I have to a sister and I want you there, right next to Mum and Dad and Jamie. They need all the support they can get against the full force of Tom’s crowd, believe me.’
But both of them had known that it was Scarlet’s family who would be doing the supporting. The day that Scarlet had been waiting and planning for for a whole year was going to test every ounce of the strength and fragile sense of acceptance that Lily had built up over the six difficult months since she left Barcelona. The fact that Scarlet and Tom had picked the anniversary of their engagement at the Stowell summer ball to get married was just one more blow for Lily to absorb on flesh that was already bruised and bleeding.
The organ swelled for the first hymn and the congregation got to their feet. Lily opened her hymn book, relieved to have something to look at. The words to the hymn were familiar enough that she didn’t need to read them, but at least staring down at them offered a temporary respite from the effort of not looking at Tristan.
He was standing just a few feet away at the front of the church beside Tom, the two of them tall and romantic in their morning suits. Lily had allowed herself a brief glance at him when she had first taken her place in the pew the moment before Scarlet had begun her stately progress down the aisle, but just the sight of his broad shoulders, the tanned hand he laid on Tom’s arm in a brief gesture of support, had impaled her on a shaft of pure, intense pain.
‘“Love divine, all loves excelling,”’ sang the congregation. The printed words danced in front of Lily’s eyes and her empty body wrenched with loneliness and misery. With massive effort she averted her thoughts, focusing instead on the enormous arrange ment of tumbling flowers just in front of her. In the last six months she had become pretty expert in the art of refocusing, of training her mind to steer away from the danger areas, and she was proud of the progress she’d made. After the first terrible month when she’d returned to London and shut herself into the house in Primrose Hill and cried herself dry, gradually she had felt herself coming back to life.
Not the life she wanted and not the life she had had before. A new life.
‘“Visit us with thy salvation. Enter every trembling heart…”’
Maggie had continued to try to tempt her with offers of work, but Lily knew that her modelling days were behind her. Externally her scars had healed—the exhausted emergency doctor who had received her from the ambulance in the small hours of the morning had done a great job—and to the outside world she looked almost the same. But inside she had changed.
She felt blank. Scoured out. Sterile. A clean slate waiting for a new start.
The hymn ended and the congregation sat down gratefully, fanning themselves with service sheets in the August heat. At the altar, Scarlet and Tom stood shoulder to shoulder preparing to bind their lives together as the sun poured through the magnificent stained glass window above them, raining jewelled drops onto Scarlet’s shimmering satin train. One of the many tiny bridesmaids recruited from the ranks of Tom’s millions of cousins was steadily picking flowers out of her tightly bound bouquet and dropping them on the floor, and Lily closed her eyes as an image of the unknown little girl who had acted as her impromptu bridesmaid in the church in Barcelona came back to her.
She felt a smile steal across her lips, remembering how cross she’d been at the time at the hurried and unceremonious wedding Tristan had arranged. Now, looking back, all she could think of was how perfect it was. No pageantry, no theatre, just the beautiful church, empty and dark in the autumn evening, a few strangers whose lives had touched hers for a brief, significant moment, the sparse service, stripped back to its simplest form…
Tom’s ‘I will’ was drowned out by a sudden wail as the small bridesmaid’s bouquet disintegrated entirely, scattering flowers everywhere. Then an audible sigh of pleasure went up from the female members of the congregation as the strikingly handsome best man stepped forward and took her by the hand, bending to scoop up her fallen roses and giving them back to her.
Lily felt as if nails were being driven into her heart.
He looked thinner, she thought in anguish, the hollows beneath his cheek bones more pronounced. His brows were pulled down severely, which somehow made the tenderness of his actions all the more affecting.
It was no use, she thought despairingly. No matter how much she tried to avert her thoughts and her eyes, no matter how much she filled her days with activity or her head with new ideas, the truth was stamped on every cell of her body and in every beat of her heart. She lifted her head and looked to the front of the church, where everything she had ever wanted was symbolised before her.
Tristan, holding the hand of a little girl.
It should have been her husband, her child. The empty spaces inside her head seemed to stretch and darken as the grief that still stalked her crept a little closer again, but she gritted her teeth and pushed it back. She had something to hold onto now…a plan to focus on that had come to feel like a sort of lifeline over the past few weeks.
She just had to hope that he would help her.
The child’s hand in his felt very small and soft, but her grip was surprisingly strong. Tristan loosened his own fingers in the hope that she would let go. Instead she seemed to hold on even more tightly.
Typical female, he thought with a sardonic twitch of his lips. He had stepped forward and taken hold of her hand completely instinctively, thinking only of heading off the storm of weeping that he could see had been just about to disrupt the whole service. Now he was beginning to regret the impulse. It appeared to be programmed into all women’s DNA to cling on more tightly when they sensed you wanted to distance yourself from them.
No. Not all women…
A great weariness descended on him as the persistent whisper in his head tauntingly reminded him of the woman who had proved to be the exception to that and every other rule. Lily had never clung to him, in any way. Not throughout the brief weeks of their doomed marriage, when she had conducted herself with nothing but dignity in the face of his appalling coldness. Not at any stage of her pregnancy, when she had been tired or sick or worried, and not even at the end, when he had so badly wanted her to.
Dios, she hadn’t even bothered with goodbye—not personally anyway, although he expected the one he had got via the kindly nurse was a lot more gentle and sympathetic than hers would have been.
‘To have and to hold from this day forward…’
From across the aisle he was aware of Tatiana, one of Scarlet’s modelling friends who was filling Lily’s role of chief bridesmaid, eyeing him seductively from under her coronet of flowers. Deliberately he looked away, focusing his attention on the bride and groom. Tom was holding Scarlet’s hand, looking straight into her eyes as he made his vows. His voice cracked with emotion, and Tristan gave a twisted smile. Tom had always been way too sensitive and sentimental—which had been why Tristan was constantly having to stop people beating him up at school.
‘For better, for worse…in sickness and in health…’
The smile vanished and he couldn’t stop the memory of another church, another wedding from stealing into the back of his mind. Another bride, in jeans and boots, her face bare of make-up and her hair tumbling down about her shoulders like a veil of spun gold.
The little bridesmaid’s small hand felt as if it were burning his, and suddenly he wanted to walk away from it all—from the palpable love between the man and woman standing in front of him, from the child holding his hand, from the mass of people grouped behind him, amongst which was Lily…
Tom said that since she’d come back to London she was doing OK. She was coping, beginning to pick up the pieces and move on. He had also added with uncharacteristic vehemence that if Tristan did or said anything to upset her today he would never forgive him. Scarlet had suggested he just stayed well out of her way.
‘As long as we both shall live.’
She was probably right. Wouldn’t anything he could say just sound insultingly inadequate? Grinding his teeth together, Tristan stared straight ahead, concentrating on a memorial stone set into the wall right in front of him. Edmund Montague, fourth Earl of Cotebrook, he read quickly, as if by filling his brain with facts he could hold back the tide of emotion that he could sense rising all around him, threatening to breach the defences of a lifetime, Officer in the King’s Regiment…Loving husband and devoted father…
And as Tom drew back the veil from his bride’s face and kissed her lin geringly, and the congregation—mainly on Scarlet’s side—burst into a round of spontaneous applause, Tristan extricated himself from the warm grasp of the small girl beside him and stood alone.
Alone with his failings.
In all of its seven-hundred-year history, surely Stowell Castle had never looked lovelier than it did that afternoon, reclining gently in its rolling fields of yellow and green, the flags flying from the turrets almost motionless against a sky of flawless blue.