Tory sighed and shrugged her hair behind her shoulder and leaned on the wrought iron railing. Up here, it was possible to imagine herself removed from it all, all the bustle and folly of the wedding plans which had dominated Green Room gossip for weeks. Not even Mr. Harding’s sudden and mysterious departure had set tongues wagging at the pace of Violet’s betrothal; indeed, Harding was forgotten before anyone could wonder what exactly had become of him. The gentlemen had all had to scurry to cover Harding’s parts, as the ladies would soon, for Violet. But there were scarcely more than bens left, anyway, in the three weeks of the season left to them. And rumor had it that Mr. Pinkerton could wait no longer.
Of course, they had all benefitted greatly from Ned Pinkerton’s interest. He had been seen on every play night in his customary front box, often with a party of friends from the Wells, thereby swelling the ranks of their audience throughout the summer. With the judicious inclusion of nautical pieces in every program to attract the residents and transients from the quayside, Jack had managed to keep the small house reasonably full all season. He had promised Tory a Harlequinade for their shared benefit night, knowing how much she preferred tumbling to verse, and while he had not told her as much, she knew he was hoping to extend the season past the second week in September, perhaps even open up for a winter season later.
Then she heard a wheeze of tired hinges and a grumpy clattering below as Mrs. Cross, their landlady, shuffled outside with her washbasin to drench her ravenous climbing flowers. And Tory darted quickly back inside, so as not to catch her landlady’s easily scandalized eye. She was not mistress of the world, not yet, she scolded herself, she only felt like it, up here in her private aerie above Moonfleet Way. Jack was out already, seeing to some last-minute business at the church, for in the absence of a living father, he had agreed to give the bride away. But he would be back soon to escort her to the church and Tory knew she had better be ready. She must bid this gorgeous morning adieu.
Jack hoped he had put on the dignity of an alderman along with his sober dark suit as he escorted Violet Owen toward her intended, down the aisle of St. Mary’s Chapel, the new, modern chapel erected at Heathpoole Wells for the convenience of its wealthy patrons. She trembled on his arm like a fragile moth, ready to be blown off-course at the slightest ill breeze, wholly dependent upon his support. Indeed, she was as pale as a moth at the moment, her light blue eyes as wide and liquid as moonshine. But Jack knew the flushing would come soon enough.
It was a lively congregation for such an intimate church. The bride’s mother, aunts and cousins in from Kent and the company of players on one side, and the groom’s family along with a party of well-wishers from the Wells on the other. All seemed suitably rapt by the ceremony of the thing, although Jenny, coerced into playing matron of honor and waiting on the bride’s side of the altar, wore an expression better suited to a funeral. Jack could not blame her, after all she’d been through with her own husband. But he could not help but wonder, as he handed Violet over to Mr. Pinkerton — who was certainly flushed enough for the two of them — if there might not be some merit in the occasion.
Certainly, the minister launched into a great load of twaddle about duty and obedience at the outset. But when he spoke of loving and cherishing, when even the groom’s lusty young male supporters had grown hushed, Jack wondered how he would feel standing before the altar with Tory on his arm. There would be no mothlike trembling with Tory; she would march boldly to her fate, come what may. The image was so beguiling, Jack almost forgot to offer his arm to Mrs. Owen for the journey back up the aisle. He scarcely dared to glance at Tory, in the front row of the spectator pews, studying the ceremony with curious attention, as if it were an unfamiliar play in a foreign language.
Had she felt it too, he wondered? They often shared thoughts, as they shared everything else. They had taken each other in heart, soul, and flesh long ago, but there had never been time or indeed opportunity to formalize the arrangement. Perhaps it didn’t matter. But perhaps it did. And here he’d caught himself lecturing Henry Harding on the evils of deception not so long ago, when he had never even troubled to take the woman he loved to wife. But that could be changed, could it not? For the first time in their unorthodox relationship, he might even have something to offer her. They had made a modest success of Heathpoole; they lived indoors, now, ate regular meals. They had work to do. They had each other. Many marriages began with far less.
The wedding breakfast was held in the coffee room of the handsome inn next to the Pump Room at Heathpoole Wells, the ladies transferred the short distance from the church by hired carriage while the gentlemen walked. It was hosted by the bride’s widowed mother, the small savings she had been able to put aside for the affair augmented by most of the proceeds from Violet’s ben the week before.
The sideboard offered up a fine display of ham and jellied tongue and buttered eggs and hot rolls with marmalade. There was a pot of chocolate at one end and a pot of coffee at the other, along with the half-dozen bottles of champagne Alphonse had grudgingly allowed Jack to contribute for toasting. Tory had overheard the gossip that Mrs. Owen had overspent her budget so as not to shame herself before the groom’s parents, down from London, who remained resolutely unimpressed by their new Kentish country in-laws. For all of Mrs. Owen’s trouble and expense, the sideboard was dominated by a colossal fortress of a wedding cake, bursting with candied fruit and nuts and spices and drenched in thick white icing under a pile of fresh blossoms and sugar rosettes, donated by young Mr. Pinkerton’s pastry cooks.
Tory had also overheard that Ned Pinkerton had hosted an extravagant supper for his gentlemen supporters the night before in a tavern at the Wells. And she wondered at the amount of money lavished on ceremony that a young newlywed couple might put to better use setting up their household. But as she sat at a little side table observing the bride and groom from a discreet distance, she supposed in the traditional way of things that this was the bride’s only moment in life to shine. Or her last moment, in Violet’s case, who was accustomed to commanding attention onstage, for certainly there was no talk of her continuing upon the stage after her marriage. Sitting at the head table in her lovely ivory gown, a wreath of tiny white rosebuds crowning her dark, upswept hair, all aglow with her new husband and the admiration of the entire assembly, Violet had never looked more beautiful.
Only imagine, then, what it must be like for ordinary females who had never been actresses, for the three girl cousins gazing at Violet with such awe and envy, or the fashionable unmarried ladies from the Wells, scrutinizing her with their critical eyes. Tory supposed the wedding day was the only brief opportunity a woman had to play the starring role in her own life, the dreams, desires and heartfelt fantasies of an entire girlhood somehow wedged into a single day. Her next public appearance would be as a young matron displaying her firstborn at its christening, and after that, the cares of repeated motherhood and the demands of her wifely duties would erase her from the public eye, as surely as the Law erased her legal existence as anything more than her husband’s possession. From dutiful daughter to bride to mother to oblivion — was this all a woman could look forward to in the civilized world?
Small wonder so much effort was thrown into the wedding day. Yet, as Tory rose for a discreet turn round the room for another cup of chocolate, she wondered at the nature of the affair. Young bloods from the groom’s party made bold by champagne toasted the couple’s Biblical fruitfulness and the groom’s captivity, while their fellows guffawed and poor Violet blushed furiously. The bride’s mother and aunts gossiped behind their fans about the groom’s income and the snobbery of his parents, while the groom’s family discreetly criticized the dress and manners of the new in-laws at whose expense they were feasting. And all of it entered into with such gusto to disguise the bald fact that Violet was ending a life she had once called her own to disappear into her husband’s shadow. The farewell performance of a lifetime. How could so much empty ceremony and hypocrisy be construed as the happiest day of a woman’s life?
When Tory returned to her table and found Jack waiting for her, fresh from his own polite circuit of the room, she wanted to seize him like a lifeline in the face of all this foolishness. Jenny had slipped away with Kit and she was starved for some sensible conversation. But unlike herself, Jack must have found something amusing in the scene, the way he was smiling at her. He stood and held her chair for her, like the characters in the farce that they were, and as soon as he took his own seat beside her, she leaned discreetly toward him.
"Promise me you’ll never marry me,” she whispered.
Jack stared at her, eyes wide, his smile evaporating.
“Does that surprise you?” Tory persisted.
He managed a sort of brittle chuckle.
“Well, it’s not the sort of thing a fellow generally expects to hear from the woman he beds.”
“I don’t know what your other bedmates tell you, but I am in earnest! This is no ceremony of love, it’s a celebration of bondage.”
Jack was looking at her in a strange, almost sad way. “I believe the bride and groom would be surprised to hear it."
“I’m serious! I would rather love you lawlessly than be shackled to you forever in legal matrimony. Promise me.”
Jack sat back a little and sighed. “I swear I will never insult you with such a proposition,” he told her solemnly.
Something seemed to dim a little in his dark eyes, but Tory supposed it was just the strain of the day. Tonight, tucked into their little tower bed on Moonfleet Way, overlooking the bay, she would set him to rights again.
Top: Wedding of Princess Charlotte to Prince Leopold, 1816
Above: Regency wedding breakfast, ca 1810. Source unknown.
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