Love, Come to Me(40)

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.