Page 20 of An Arranged Marriage with a Mad Marquess
Chapter Seven
They all must have known that she had been crying. Patrina tried to wipe her eyes surreptitiously, but it was no use. In a carriage of that size, one could not hideanything.
Everybody found a way to have their eyes elsewhere, while Patrina muffled her sniffs and dabbed at her eyes with an already damp handkerchief.
“It isn’t such a long journey, you know,” Lady Cynthia Tidemore said in a rush. “Three and a half hours is quite manageable. After a week or two, I imagine your family will be coming to visit with us all the time, and you travelling to them. We can have a carriage set aside for your personal use, whenever you like.”
She was trying, at least. Patrina gave her new sister-in-law a watery smile. “It has been a day full of emotion,” she said, a trifle unnecessarily. “I think I am just tired.”
“Are you cold?” Cynthia pressed. “Here, you must share my rug with me.”
Without waiting for a response, she draped a soft rug over their knees, its warm weight resting heavy across Patrina’s lap. The warmth was a little too much – the carriage was already growing stuffy – but the weight was reassuring, somehow. She leaned back against the carriage seat and surveyed her fellow travellers for the first time.
Cynthia was a pretty woman, with the green-gold eyes which Patrina was beginning to realize were the hallmark of a Tidemore, and thick, impeccably arranged black hair. She wore a deep pink gown which suited her colouring well.
The Dowager, Lady Emma Tidemore, was a little more serious, a little more haughty. She stared at Patrina as if tryingto make a study of her. Which, Patrina supposed, she was. What woman wanted to meet her daughter-in-law for the first time on the day of her son’s wedding?
“Are you comfortable, my dear?” Lady Emma said at last. “May I call you Patrina, or would you prefer something more formal?”
“Patrina will do,” she responded.
“And you must call me Cynthia,” the other woman said at once, not to be undone. “We’ll be a family, after all.”
Patrina smiled weakly and turned her attention to her new husband.
She had been too nervous to look much at him before, besides the occasion where his hand shook so violently, she had thought he was going to drop the ring. It was oddly touching, and she was holding his hand to steady it before she even knew what she was doing.
He looked handsome, if pale and tired. His thick dark hair was brushed simply back, locks falling defiantly forward over his temples and forehead, and the glow of his green eyes was a little faded. As if sensing her eyes on him, he glanced her way, and their gazes met.
Her initial reaction was to drag her gaze away, to stare out of the window, or pretend to be looking at something else.
No,Patrina told herself.I am a married woman. I am a Marchioness.
She held his gaze, and he looked away first.
Outside, the first fat, threatening drops of rain began to fall from a grey sky.
“Rain on a wedding day,” the Dowager remarked. “That’s bad luck.”
“Mama!” Cynthia hissed. “That is impolite.”
“It’s quite all right,” Patrina said. “I don’t believe in luck, bad or otherwise. I believe that we make our own good, one way or another.”
The Dowager turned slate-grey eyes to stare at Patrina. Again, Patrina did not let her gaze drop.
“Interesting,” she said at last. “An interesting opinion. Do you have many of them, my dear Patrina? Opinions, I mean?”
Patrina flashed a smile. She was already feeling better. “Oh, I have lots, Lady Emma.Quite a lot.”
Surprise flickered across the older woman’s face, just for a moment.
“I see. Well, I hope you’ll allow me to show you the way things are done in Morendale Manor, Patrina. Tradition is so important, don’t you think?”
“I believe it can be,” she responded. “But not always. After all, you say things are done a certain way at the Manor, yes?”
“Yes, for hundreds of years.”
“Then perhaps it is time for a change.”
