A Stranger at Castonbury(38)
A soft giggle made her turn away from the window. Lydia sat with two of the other young lady guests, whispering and laughing with them. She looked as if she was having a wonderful time, and Catalina smiled to see it. That was surely what weddings were for—to bring people together and make them happy.
Not upend their lives, as knowledge of a certain secret wedding years ago would surely do in this little world.
At last their carriage shuddered to a halt, and a footman rushed around to open the door. As Catalina stepped down to follow the girls up the front steps, she heard a soft tapping sound on the pavement behind her. She turned to see Jamie just as the light from one of the high windows fell over him.
He wore fashionable, if stark, black and white evening clothes, the only spark of colour a ruby pin at his cravat. His hair was brushed smoothly back from his face, revealing the arc of the scar on his cheek. And he was using the walking stick again.
As he moved beside her, Catalina couldn’t help but wonder again what had happened to him. She ached to think he had been in pain, and she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything to reach out to him. To hold him close and take away anything he had suffered. To somehow make it right again.
Yet she seemed to be a cause of some of that pain to him, and it made her wonder again what had happened to him after they had parted in Spain. He gave her a grim smile as they moved up the shallow stone steps together, and he didn’t quite meet her eyes. They were so near to each other, so close she could just reach out and brush his sleeve with her hand, but he was as far from her as he had ever been.
Still silent, they moved into the building behind the others. They left their wraps with the servants in the corridor and climbed the steps to the grand second-floor ballroom. It was a lovely space, a long room surmounted by crystal chandeliers and lined with marble columns.
But the ballroom was so crowded there didn’t seem even an inch to move about, and Catalina wondered how anyone could possibly dance. Conversation rose in a roar all around her, words indistinct as friends greeted one another and jests were made and enjoyed. The musicians on a dais at one end of the room were tuning up. The smells of various perfumes, baked meats and sweet punch hung in the air, and the room was warm with all the people packed inside it. Catalina could see Lydia’s white gown a few feet ahead of her, but several people had slipped in between them and they were all caught in the crush. She was against the wall on one side, and Jamie was on the other.
She could feel his heat brush against her bare arm.
‘It is not much like the dances in Spain, is it?’ he said quietly near her ear.
Catalina laughed and shook her head. ‘No, indeed. There is no canvas tent, and from what I can hear the music is a bit more...accomplished.’
Jamie smiled down at her, and for an instant he looked like the old Jamie, her Jamie. The man who had danced with her at those impromptu parties in Colonel Chambers’s spacious tent. He had been such a grand dancer; he had always made her feel as if she was floating over the dance floor. As if for one moment things were not so dark and complicated.
‘The fashions are perhaps a bit more à la mode as well,’ he said. ‘Yet I must say I think I prefer that tent in Spain.’
Catalina glanced past his shoulder to see that most of the crowd around them had turned to stare at him, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the long-lost Castonbury heir, found alive and returned amongst them. Most of the ladies were smoothing their hair or straightening their gowns as they watched him.
‘Too much attention here?’ she said. Jamie had never been one to seek to draw attention to himself. He had always quietly observed the world around him. He did not have to seek attention; it naturally came to him, as if all the light in every room collected only on him. And it had nothing to do with his rank, or even his handsome looks, but from that quiet strength at the core of him.
So much had changed since Spain, but that quality about him had not.
Jamie shrugged. He didn’t even turn to look at the room, he just watched her. ‘They are merely staring at my father. My siblings tell me he has seldom left the house these past few years. Everyone has forgot what he looks like.’
Catalina shook her head. ‘You know that’s not true. It’s you they want to see again.’
‘I am nothing to see. Just this blasted stick. They will tire of gossiping about me soon enough.’
She was sure that was not true, not when he had given them so much to gossip about. Coming back from the dead, an imposter wife and son, financial twists and turns, a passel of shocking marriages amongst his siblings—the scandal broth seemed bottomless. She didn’t want to add to it.