Ashton Park (41 page)

“There. It’s done now, Miss Holly. We’re all done. We can move on. It’s a beautiful place is Ashton Park. God has set things right for you and me. A lot of the young people have left but we’re still here. We can put some life back in. Holly and Norah. We can do that together. Who’d ever have guessed?”

Edward came around a hedge at the side of the Lodge, past the tall walls of fieldstone and mortar. He had heard a car door slam and the crunch of gravel as the motorcar drove away. There was only a tall figure in a blue cloak and hood standing at the steps that led up to the high wooden door. The person’s back was to him but Edward knew immediately who it was. He stood still, trying to grasp what was happening.

She felt someone behind her and turned just as banks of gray mist rolled down off the green hills that surrounded the massive stone building with its numerous chimneys. Edward wore a short black jacket and a kilt with a black and red pattern. Her hood was up because of the damp but it was up for Edward too because she remembered the first time they had kissed at the hut in the rain and the ash trees and she wanted him to remember also. The gray covered them both and hid their faces. Then a breeze broke the mists apart.

“Char,” he said.

“You look wonderful, Edward. Every inch the Highlander.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you. Your father asked me to come.”

“My father?” Lines of anger cut Edward’s face. “Why?”

“They think I still love you. And that perhaps you still love me.”

“Now? My father brings you here now? I’m to be married in a fortnight.”

“And I have an understanding with a young man in Ramsey.”

Edward still had not moved. “Then what is the point of us meeting again?”

“Your parents have given us permission to wed. If we wish it.”

“After all these years? It’s too late.”

“It might be. Or it might not.”

The anger left his face as if the wind had removed it with the mist. “Do you…do you still care for me?”

“I do. Or I wouldn’t have come.”

“You have feelings? Three years later?”

“I do.”

Edward looked around him at the hills as if to clear his head. Then put his gaze back on her. “I can’t see your face.”

Charlotte paused a moment before pulling her hood back. She saw him react as he took in the blue of her eyes and the line of her face and neck and throat. Her dark hair was loose and about her shoulders, and the breeze moving down from the hilltops began to play with it and swirl it and bring it across her lips and cheeks. She stretched her hands to him.

“Come to me, my love,” she whispered.

He crossed the ground between them and took her in his arms and kissed her as if he needed her breath to live.

“I…I don’t understand,” he managed to get out.

“Your parents thought Lady Caroline wanted to marry you—to get back at Kipp—and that you wanted to marry Lady Caroline—to get back at them—”

“I shut you out…I smothered my feelings for you—killed them—so it wouldn’t hurt anymore…but now this…I see your face…”

He grasped her face in both his hands. Tears flowed from her blue eyes over her skin but she was smiling, almost laughing.

“What is it?” he asked in a worried voice. “Are you all right?”

“I feel so free,” she said. “I feel so alive. You’re not going to stop, are you? You haven’t run out of kisses, have you? Not my Highlander?” She knotted her fingers in his hair and tugged him back into her embrace.

He pressed his face to her hair and cheeks. “It will be a scandal. The Scarboroughs will never forgive us. First Kipp and now me. The father has powerful connections. There will be trouble.”

“Your mother and father know that. After we are married they are sending us away. Far from England and the gossips and the Scarboroughs.”

“Where?”

“To Canada. To America. Far to the west. Where there are mountains and deserts and animals with the beauty and ferocity of Africa. Just you and I in a vast unleashed wilderness.”

“I had forgotten how strong you are. How quick your mind is…”

“Shhh. No more compliments. Take me into your castle and dress me in silks and roses and make a lady of me.”

Edward suddenly lifted her in his arms. “I shall, Lady Charlotte. How long are you going to make me wait?”

She buried her head against his neck. “Not two minutes. Your parents agreed we could be married here.”

“Here? Now?” Edward laughed. “You have everything planned out.”

“Your father is parked just down the road. He rang up a Presbyterian minister he knew and asked him to be ready if we needed him. Do we need him?”

Edward swung her about until she shrieked and startled blackbirds swooped off the Lodge’s roof in a cloud. “I cannot wait another half hour to make you my wife. I cannot wait ten minutes.”

“Try harder,” Charlotte laughed. “I think the minister summers in a cottage a hundred miles away.”

The minister was only a mile away and came to the Lodge that evening. By a great hearth with a fire crackling red and white, while candles and lamps rested on tables and windowsills, he married Edward Danforth to Charlotte Squire. Barlope stood with Edward and Miss Barrington with Charlotte, and Sir William stood back of the scene, hands by his side, beaming and composing a cable in his mind for his wife. The year-round staff at the Lodge, a dozen servants, were in a semicircle behind him. Large, immaculate stag heads with enormous antlers gazed down on the ceremony with quiet eyes.

“Repeat after me,” said the white-haired minister in a voice that rolled about the room and rumbled among crags and burns and woodlands. “I, Edward Danforth, take thee, Charlotte Squire, to be my lawful wedded wife.”

Edward, the firelight flickering over his face and over his shining black coat and kilt, repeated the phrase as he took in Charlotte’s loveliness. He wanted to add,
You are like a candle, and you push back all my darkness.

The minister smiled at Charlotte. “Repeat after me, my dear. I, Charlotte Squire, take you, Edward Danforth, to be my lawful wedded husband.”

Charlotte faced Edward in a white gown a duchess had worn one evening in the eighteenth century and left behind, a dress stored perfectly by the masters and mistresses of the Lodge so that it shone in the lamplight like a garment newly made. She spoke the words the minister spoke, gazing at Edward, and whispering so that the old minister could not hear,
“My lover, my dream, my kiss in the forest and the rain.
”

Edward squeezed her right hand and longed to bring it to his lips. “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ’til death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

She repeated the same words to him, adding that she would obey as well as love and cherish him. “And thereto I give thee my troth.”

Rings sparkled. Sir William had requested the jewelry of the Lodge be sorted through—
plundered
was the word Edward had jokingly used—until rings that both fit and suited the bride and groom be found. Edward slipped Charlotte’s on her finger as if it had been sized for her at a fine shop in Edinburgh.

“With this ring I thee wed,” he told her, “with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

There were no words for the double-ring ceremony Charlotte had insisted on. She pushed the large gold ring fashioned in the 1780s onto Edward’s finger and quoted the Book of Ruth from memory: “
Whither
thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be
my people, and thy God my God.
”

“Let us pray,” the minister said.

Edward and Charlotte knelt. When the prayer was done the minister brought them to their feet and joined their right hands together again. “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. Forasmuch as Edward and Charlotte have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and thereto have given and pledged their troth either to other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving of a ring, and by joining hands, I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

“
A day like this,
” whispered Charlotte to Edward, “
should never have to end, should it? Can’t we make the sun stand still over Gibeon?
”

Edward embraced her. “With your beauty and your spirit, you could.”

“Congratulations, my boy.”

Sir William and Edward shook hands in front of the fireplace.

“Thank you, Father. I never dreamed when I woke up this morning that I would be returning to my bed with a bride.”

Sir William laughed. “Indeed.”

“I’ll be forever grateful to you and Mum for that.”

Sir William put a hand on Edward’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a harsh season between your mother and me and you, and we take the full blame for that. This may all seem rather plotted and contrived but it had less to do with Lady Caroline than it did with having you marry the woman we believed you still loved. Much has changed for us and our family since the war. Much has changed in the way your mother and I look at England and the circles we move in. We realized it was not right that you be denied the love of a splendid woman like young Charlotte Squire when we had permitted Victoria to wed Ben Whitecross and Kipp to marry Christelle Cevennes. I wish you all the best and the richest possible blessings of God on your marriage. There will be a proper family reception for the two of you once we return to Ashton Park, but for now I hope Mrs. Danforth will find Scotland and the Lodge agreeable.”

Charlotte came up and put her arm through Edward’s. “I will, Sir William, I will. My head is still spinning from the events of the day, and good Scottish air will set it to rights. I hope we may linger for a day or two.”

Sir William smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “Of course. I haven’t been up here in years. I should like the opportunity of a stiff hike or two.” He glanced at Barlope and Miss Barrington who were standing nearby. “I wonder if Lord Thornton will be able to bear up a few more days without the pair of you.”

Barlope inclined his head. “I would dearly love a hunt, Sir William, if that could be arranged.”

“A hunt. It can. Naturally it can. I will get off a telegram to Lord Thornton tonight and explain the necessity of your extended absence. Miss Barrington?”

She nodded. “I should like nothing better than to sit out in the heather with a book by Sir Walter Scott, sir. I’m happy to linger, as Lady Danforth suggests.”

Charlotte laughed. “Lady Danforth? I carry no title. I’m still good old Charlotte to you, Betty.”

Her friend shook her head. “You may still be Charlotte, but things will be different now, my dear. Very different.”

Charlotte smiled at Edward. “In a good way, I hope.”

Edward held her chin gently with his thumb and finger. “In the best of ways, Charlotte Danforth. I’ll make a world for you straight out of Hans Christian Andersen. You’ll see.”

January 1921

January rain lashed the tall library windows. Sir William paused in his comments as he glanced out at a grim dark pierced by the long silver needles. Then he turned back to his family.

“Edward and Charlotte write that they enjoy the snow in the mountains of Alberta more than they enjoy the rain of England.” He waved the letter while the others laughed, seated in various places and in various chairs throughout the library. “They admit it is colder but, on the other hand, they can swim outdoors in the thermal springs. And they have recently been taught to ski by a man from Switzerland and to ice skate by a couple who used to live in Quebec. We have set them up in a suite of rooms at a hotel that is built in the Scottish Baronial style. So Edward has not left the Lodge and Scotland far behind, and Charlotte says he is in his element. For which I think we can all thank the Lord, eh?”

Kipp and Robbie and several others clapped.