Her mother kept talking, but Chloe focused on the bird. It was a green finch.
Her mother patted her back. “. . . but I guess that’s how they did it in 1812. Sad, really. When you two really do marry, you’ll have a real wedding. I’ll see to that. Let’s go, dear. It’s time. Do take off those glasses. Since when do you need glasses? They look so—horsey.”
Chloe kept the glasses on. Her dad stuck the nosegay in her right hand and linked his arm in her left. Just as they stepped over the threshold of the church door, she heard a finch call out.
The church felt twenty degrees cooler and smelled—like churches smell everywhere, all over the world. Vaulted ceilings and carved stone moldings added to the chill. Candles flickered in the drafts. With his perfect profile, Sebastian stood at the altar, waiting.
For a fake wedding, it sure felt real. She leaned on her dad. Henry wore a bottle-green cutaway coat and practically paced in his pew.
She wanted to wrap her arms around him, or at least catch his eye. But he was the only one not looking at her, the bride, as she made her way to the altar. Even Grace glared and drummed her gloved fingers on the scrolled pew railing in front of her. Immediately after the wedding, Grace would be sent home. She had lost the competition. But of course, filming her watch the wedding made fabulous drama, so she had to stay.
For a minute it did seem like a movie and not like the real thing. Chloe felt like she was looking down on herself getting married—again. The first time around, sixteen years ago, it seemed exactly the same. Movielike. Unreal. An out-of-body experience in a white dress. Back then, of course, the white dress was appropriate. As a thirty-nine-year-old divorcée with an eight-year-old stateside, not to mention her ice-house moment, it seemed downright scandalous.
Sebastian, the cad, in a tight black cutaway coat, white breeches, and black shoes, looked the part he was playing. Chloe could tell he didn’t like the glasses. He kept squinting and clearing his throat as the curate spoke.
She looked around the rim of her bonnet for Henry.
The curate had already started the ceremony. “. . . and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding . . .”
How could you take this lightly? She looked up at the rose window.
“. . . but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.”
She was sober all right. A lot more sober than she was hitting the laudanum at the crack of dawn this morning. Two video cams turned in on her.
“. . . if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it . . .”
Chloe looked up at the curate, and opened her mouth, afraid that nothing would come out, but it did.
She let her rosebud nosegay drop to the stone floor. “I can’t marry him.”
“Pardon me?” The curate’s book slid down from his chest to his side. A great rustling and shuffling and whispering came from behind her.
“Well, that’s a relief!” Grace stood up. “It saves me from having to announce an impediment—or two.”
Chloe’s mother stood, too, and leaned on the pew in front of her, apparently for strength. And Henry—where was Henry?
Chloe looked straight into Sebastian’s eyes. “I can’t marry the wrong Mr. Wrightman. Even if it is just for TV.” Her eyes darted around the church. Henry was gone.
Whispering rose up to the church’s vaulted ceiling.
Sebastian grabbed her by the arm. “What are you doing?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You can’t do this to me in front of everybody.”
Mrs. Crescent stepped up to the wedding group. “She can’t mean it, Mr. Wrightman. She’s just nervous. Let me talk with her.”
The curate furrowed his brows.
The cameras stayed on Chloe.
“Let go of me,” she said to Sebastian, and yanked her arm away from him. A ray of sunlight shone through the rose window. “You’re no gentleman. And you never will be. You’re not the brooding, silent type. In fact, I don’t know what you are, and you don’t know what—or who—you want. I don’t care how much money you have—you can take it and stick it into your breeches for all I care!”
Sebastian stepped backward, his perfect jawline askew.
Cook—Lady Anne—made her way up to the altar. “Miss Parker—let me explain.”
“No, let me explain.” Chloe stood next to the marble altar draped in a maroon sash. Her voice echoed throughout the pulpit. “The real gentleman here is Henry, who stands to win nothing and gain nothing. The rest of us are just modern-day screwups in gowns and cutaway coats. Pretending. Grace is pretending so she can win back her family’s land that her great-great-great grandfather lost gambling. I’m pretending I’m not divorced, with an eight-year-old daughter at home waiting for me.”
The small crowd gasped. Henry was still nowhere to be seen.
“I thought this was real. It isn’t. Everyone’s pretending—except of course, for Lady Anne, who, as far as I can tell, is the real deal. But the rest of us? We can’t even act like Regency people. We know too much, we’ve done too much, and said too much to even pretend to live in the nineteenth century. Here, Grace.” Chloe tossed her nosegay to Grace, who caught it. “You marry him. For TV or real life or land or money or all of the above. I don’t care.”
Chloe untied her wedding bonnet. Her dad tried to pull the cameramen away. She dumped her bonnet upside down on the altar, where the cameras filmed a vibrator, a pink MP3 player, whitening strips, a pack of cigarettes, and condoms wrapped in black foil tumble onto the maroon altar cloth.
“Dear God!” Mrs. Crescent gasped. “Don’t throw it away now, Chloe. We’ve won. Don’t.”
“We can’t live like it’s 1812. Not even for a few weeks. Come and get your stash, Grace. I’m going home. Back to my daughter, where I belong.”
The curate stepped up to her and put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.
Grace stepped up to the altar. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. These aren’t mine.”
“Don’t be stupid, Grace. This is the twenty-first century. I had my gloves on every time I handled them. A simple dusting for thumbprints will prove they’re yours, and if that doesn’t work—there are always DNA tests.”
Chloe’s mother barreled up to the pulpit. The cameras loomed in on Chloe from the front. She felt hunted. Her dad clenched his teeth. Her mom’s manicured nails clawed at her even through her gloves. She had to get out of here.
She hoisted up her gown, dodged them all, and ran all the way down the aisle, out the church door, down the steps, past the tombstones, and right smack into the white wedding carriage, an open barouche covered in pink peonies and pink ribbons. Not just one, but four horses turned their heads. She untied them from the hitching post, clambered up to the driver’s perch, and with a shaking hand, flicked the reins. The horses lunged forward. When she looked back she saw everyone had spilled out of the church, past the stone fence, but nobody else had a horse. They had all walked to the wedding in their finery! She brought the horses to a trot. The great carriage rattled along, peonies flew off, ribbons flapped, her updo collapsed.
When she finally reached the iron gates that marked the end of the deer park and the beginning of the real world, she stopped the carriage. The gravel road ended. A paved road intersected it. She hadn’t seen blacktop in weeks. It looked so unnatural, yet so promising. The open road. It was the American in her, all right, thrilled to hit the open road.
A red Jaguar whizzed by on the wrong side of the street, because of course, this was England, and it startled the horses. She couldn’t exactly ride a barouche into town, now, could she? She stepped out of the carriage, guided the horses to a wrought-iron hitching post on the edge of the deer park, and tied them to it.