They arrived at Westcott House the following day to warm hugs and welcomes—and a tearful reunion with Captain Harry Westcott, who had come downstairs, against advice, when their carriage was heard. His fever had ebbed the night before and had not returned this morning, but he was weak and tired and complaining about the broths and jellies the cook was sending up to him.
Wren watched the three of them in a tight hug together in the main hall and blinked her eyes. The ladies had, of course, been taken completely by surprise and were not willing to let him go.
It was easy to see from where Harry had acquired his good looks. His mother was blond and elegant and still beautiful, and his younger sister was fair haired, dainty, and exquisitely pretty.
Miss Kingsley was the first to turn from the group. She approached them with a smile and eyes that were bright with unshed tears. “Althea,” she said to Mrs. Westcott, “you must think my manners have gone begging. How delightful it is to see you again, and how good it was of you to invite Abby and me to come here for a family wedding when I never feel sure we ought to lay claim to membership. And Elizabeth and Alexander! You are both looking well. Present me to your betrothed if you will, Alexander. I assume this is she.” She turned her attention upon Wren.
“Yes indeed,” the Earl of Riverdale said, drawing Wren’s hand through his arm. “Cousin Viola and Abigail, I have the pleasure of presenting my betrothed, Miss Wren Heyden.”
“I say, Mama,” Captain Westcott said, “Miss Heyden sat with me throughout the bout of fever I arrived home with. She bathed my face with cool cloths and listened to my ravings without once calling me an idiot. And this morning she sneaked me a piece of toast after I have been tortured with nothing but gruels in which there is not a single lump of meat or vegetables a man could get his teeth into.”
“Physician’s orders, Harry,” Elizabeth said, laughing. “And now that you have betrayed poor Wren I daresay she will be arrested and dragged off within the hour to sit in the stocks.”
“Miss Heyden.” The former countess extended her hand, her eyes roaming over Wren’s face. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I thank you for the note you included with Althea’s second letter and the personal invitation to your wedding. It tipped the scales in favor of our coming. Did it not, Abby? And now I find that I am even more deeply in your debt. You have been caring for my son and preventing him from devouring beefsteaks and ale when he was feverish, the foolish boy. I will forgive the toast this morning.”
Wren thought about how difficult it must have been for her to come to the wedding of the man who now bore the title that had been her son’s. And to come here to the house that had been hers. Yet now she was shaking the hand of the woman who tomorrow would assume the title that had been her own for longer than twenty years, and she was smiling graciously as though she felt no pang at all.
“I think it will soon be time for the beefsteaks and ale,” Wren said. “You must find your son looking dreadfully thin.”
“Ah but,” she said, her eyes brightening with more tears, “he is alive.”
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Heyden,” Abigail Westcott said, stepping away from her brother’s side in order to offer her hand to Wren. “My cousin Jessica wrote to me about you. She is enormously impressed that you are a businesswoman and a very successful one. I am impressed too. Thank you for looking after my brother.”
“Everyone else has done so too,” Wren told her. “Mrs. Westcott and Lizzie and I have taken turns sitting with him during the day, and Lord Riverdale sleeps in his dressing room at night. The Duke of Netherby has come each day to spend an hour or more with him.”
“And has looked at me through his quizzing glass every time I complain about the food,” the captain said indignantly, “and informed me I am getting to be a bore. He treats me as though I were a schoolboy again.”
“I cannot believe you are here and I am not merely dreaming, Harry,” Abigail said. “You are not going back to that horrid place, are you? Promise me you are not?”
“The Peninsula?” he said. “Of course I am going back. I am an officer, Abby. A captain, no less. I was promoted—just after I had almost got my arm sliced off, in fact. I have men counting on me out there and I am not going to let them down. I don’t want to let them down.”
“I know,” she said, tossing her glance at the ceiling. “It is all a great lark. Well, I am not going to quarrel with you, Harry. Not today, anyway.”
“Come upstairs to the drawing room,” Mrs. Westcott said. “You must be ready for refreshments.”
“I shall see Harry back to his room,” Lord Riverdale said. “Would you like to come too, Abigail?”
“I will come in a short while, Harry,” his mother said.
“To tuck me in, I suppose,” he said with a grin.
“Well, I am your mama,” she reminded him. She walked beside Wren as they climbed the stairs. “I am so sorry, Miss Heyden. All the focus of attention ought to be upon you today. You are tomorrow’s bride.”
“I am perfectly contented that it be upon Captain Westcott,” Wren said. “The Duke of Netherby informed us that his captaincy was awarded for an act of extraordinary bravery. How he got that information out of your son, I do not know. He has said nothing to the rest of us. He is a modest young man and I like him exceedingly.”
“You have endeared yourself to a mother’s heart,” Miss Kingsley said. “Again.”
Word spread fast. The Duke of Netherby paid his accustomed call before the morning was out, bringing his stepmother and Lady Jessica with him. Miss Kingsley went up to the captain’s room not long after and Abigail came down. She and Lady Jessica met in the middle of the drawing room and hugged each other with exclamations and squeals of joy—the squeals were Lady Jessica’s. They sat on the window seat, their heads together as they chattered away, their facial expressions bright with animation.
Wren was not ignored. Quite the contrary. She was drawn into a group with Mrs. Westcott and Elizabeth and the dowager duchess, who plied her with questions about the wedding clothes for which she had shopped during the past week. Abigail came to sit beside her later, after her cousin had run upstairs to look in on the captain—“if I can get past Avery,” she said, pulling a face as she left the room. Abigail wanted to know about the wedding plans. Her mother made much of Wren for the rest of the day and told her how happy she was.
“Alexander has always been one of the nicest people I know even apart from those impossibly romantic good looks of his,” she said, “and I am delighted to know he is to be happily settled.”
Lord Riverdale himself stayed close to her all evening.
Belowstairs, all was apparently busy in preparation for tomorrow’s wedding breakfast.
It was a busy, pleasant wedding eve, Wren told herself all day, and indeed she enjoyed it. Yet she felt horribly lonely through it all. They were a close-knit family, the Westcotts, despite the ghastly upheavals of last year that had shaken them to the roots and threatened to break them asunder. She felt her aloneness, her lack of a family of her own, like a physical weight. Perhaps tomorrow she would feel differently. She would be a member of this family. She would be a Westcott. She would belong.