The urges frightened her. Elated her. Stole her breath and sped her heart until it kicked against her ribs.
Tonight. Their wedding night. Would he be able to go through with it?
Would she?
Murdoch arrived with a gown of pristine cream silk, trimmed at the neck and sleeves with expensive handmade lace and adorned with nothing more than an endless row of pearl buttons that ran from the high neckline to the waist where the skirt flared and fell in simple, elegant layers.
Farah recognized the dress, as it had hung in her own closet back in London where she’d figured, if her marriage had ever come into question, she could produce the simple gown as corroboration to her story.
It wasn’t meant to be a wedding dress, she knew, but it had called to her from a shop window on the Strand, and she’d been lost to it the moment her hand had drifted over the pearly silk.
Blackwell had been in her wardrobe. He’d touched her things. A picture of him running his rough hands over her clothes, across her silky delicates, flared in her mind, and she had to focus very carefully on dressing and her conversation with Murdoch, lest he guess the direction her thoughts had taken.
Pinning her hair into a braided bun at the crown of her head, she left a few ringlets to fall against her cheek and neck. There, if she wasn’t ready to be married, at least she looked it.
Ben More Castle’s chapel was arid with disuse, and Farah announced her presence with a sneeze that disturbed the veil of white lace Murdoch had produced for her.
No prelude music preceded her and Murdoch down the aisle, just the sound of her heels on the aged stones, the staccato of heavy rain beginning to fall against the roof, and the pulsing rush of blood in her ears.
Murdoch whispered something that she didn’t quite catch, but Farah gave a stilted nod, and he seemed to take that as an acceptable answer.
The castle’s hodgepodge of outcasts lined the first pew closest to the bare and largely unused altar in front of which stood a rather harried-looking young priest. His round spectacles rested at a crooked angle on his nose, and his unruly red hair stuck out in such a way, Farah was reminded of baby chickens when they began to lose their fuzz in disorganized tufts.
The men stood when they entered, and Frank courteously and inappropriately blessed her sneeze in his booming voice. Dressed in a suit that must have fit him in the days he consumed fewer pastries, he fidgeted with his crooked tie while, next to him, Tallow watched their steady progression down the aisle, not facing the bride, but Murdoch.
Farah counted five other household staff, along with the stable master, Mr. Weston, and his stable hand. The groundskeeper, a shifty-eyed man with a Greek-sounding name, and a couple of other faces with which Farah was unacquainted.
She was grateful their expressions were blurred from behind the veil, and that it obscured hers from them, as well. It helped conceal the fact that she had yet to look at him.
Her bridegroom stood motionless to the right of the priest, a tall, broad figure swathed in black. The shadows and angles of his strong jaw and shock of ebony hair were visible, but little else. Farah found the veil made the whole ordeal easier. She could pretend that today was a happy day, long awaited and full of words like hope and promise and future instead of shadowed by vengeance, duty, and the past.
Reaching the priest, Farah turned to face Dorian once Murdoch had given her away. They both stood silent during the ceremony, still but for her quaking legs, while the priest solemnly recited scripture in an airy lilting Scottish accent and adjusted his glasses enough times to dub the behavior obsessive.
When the priest asked for the ring, Frank stepped forward gripping both sides of a small wooden box as though he presented them with the Holy Grail.
Blackwell opened the box and extracted from the black velvet a white-gold ring adorned with a single diamond fashioned in the shape of a tear. Well, a tear only if Goliath ever cried. Or Cyclops, maybe.
The massive diamond wasn’t white, but a silvery-gray that caught each facet of the wan light filtering in from the chapel windows, its sparkle underscored by darker shadows that made the gleam more brilliant somehow.
“It’s lovely,” she breathed, holding out her trembling left hand.
Dorian held it up in his black-leather-clad fingers so it would catch the light. “Gray diamonds are the rarest and most valuable in the world,” he said. “It seemed appropriate that you should have one.”
Were she not in the middle of her own wedding ceremony, Farah would have snorted. Of course he would think that the wife of the Blackheart of Ben More should have some obscenely expensive ring to demonstrate his wealth and power to all the world. Regardless of the reason, Farah had to admit she would be glad to wear it, having never owned something so lovely or valuable in her life.
“Well, put the blasted thing on her bloody finger, lad, we’re all going to die with purple faces if we’re forced to hold our breaths verra much longer.” Murdoch’s impatient prompt broke the mesmerizing spell of the ring, and Blackwell studied her extended fingers.
He cast Murdoch a dark look and the priest flinched at the old man’s profanity, but they all watched in fascinated silence as Dorian visibly prepared himself. Pinching the bottom and diamond between his thumb and forefinger, he slid the ring onto her hand with hardly a brush of his leather glove, before snatching his fist back.
Farah learned that Dorian decided to forgo a ring, as was the husband’s prerogative, and they got on with the ceremony. Her mind drifted to another wedding, in a different small, dusty church. This one attended only by the two souls who wanted to bind their destinies together. Farah was glad that this ceremony was Christian instead of the more archaic fashion like she and Dougan had. She couldn’t have said those words to another.