Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (46 page)

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Authors: Amanda McCabe

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BOOK: Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride

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Carmen squeezed her eyes shut. “They are closed.”

There was a rustle of cloth, another long-suffering sigh, then, “All right. You may look now.”

Carmen opened her eyes. And gave a great shout of laughter.

Peter stood before her attired in a rather brief white muslin, gold trimmed tunic. His legs, muscled and dusted with fine, blond hairs, were bare from the knee down to his laced gold sandals.

His face, usually so very cool and haughty, was a bright cherry red as he tugged at the tunic’s hem.

Carmen sat down on the edge of her bed, as she feared she might otherwise fall over with the force of her mirth. “Oh!” she gasped. “It—it is wondrous.”

“Elizabeth made me wear it,” he muttered.

“I adore it! You should dress in this fashion every day.”

Isabella burst into the room, trailed by her harried new maid. She wore a miniature of her mother’s gown, only made of a heavier silver satin. A crown of silver leaves perched atop her curls, and she held a tiny bow and arrow.

“Oh!” she cried. “You look beautiful, Mama.” Then she looked at Peter. “And so do you, Papa. Though I have never seen a man’s legs before.”

Carmen buried her giggles behind her hand.

Isabella came to her mother and leaned against her happily. “What a very nice looking family we are!” she proclaimed with great satisfaction.

“Endymion the shepherd, as his flock he guarded, she the moon Selene ...”

Isabella, perched atop a short marble column, angelic in her silver gown, faltered, and glanced uncertainly at her mother.

Carmen struggled to hold her pose without laughing. Her lovely gown was proving too thin for the rather chilly night, and goose bumps had popped out on her shoulders. Her arms ached from holding aloft her wooden, silver-painted moon. And Peter, stretched out on the floor of the makeshift stage as the sleeping shepherd, kept surreptitiously reaching out to grab her ankle.

It was the grandest fun she had had in years. So very welcome after such dreadful events.

Without turning her head, she whispered, “Selene saw him, loved him, sought him ...”

Isabella frowned and lowered her little bow. There was actually no Cupid in the myth, but the role had been invented for her at the last moment, and she wanted to play it to the hilt. “Must I say that, Mama?” she said very loudly.

The audience laughed.

“Yes, dear,” said Carmen. “It is part of the speech.”

“Very well,” Isabella sighed. “But since you have already said it, I don’t think I ought to repeat it.” She lifted her bow again. “And coming down from heaven, kissed him and lay beside him.”

Carmen knelt down beside Peter and loudly kissed him on the cheek.

Isabella laughed. “You have lip rouge on your cheek, Peter!”

The audience, already warm with champagne and the general hilarity of all the tableaux (especially the one where Elizabeth, as Hera, had entered trailing twenty feet of blue velvet curtain behind her) collapsed in mirth.

Isabella faced the merrymakers with a fierce scowl on her little face. “We are not finished yet!”

Elizabeth, her own whoops concealed behind her hand, waved her fan at her guests. “Yes, do let them finish!”

Isabella nodded in satisfaction. “Evermore he slumbers, Endymion the shepherd.”

There was silence.

“Now
we are finished,” she said, and jumped off her column perch to curtsy.

There was wild applause, and everyone rose from their chairs in ovation.

“Bravo!” cried Georgina, her red curls twisted wildly in her guise of Medusa. “What an actress you have here, Carmen. Bring her to Italy one day, and we shall put her on the stage at La Fenice.”

Isabella’s eyes widened in delight. “Really?”

Carmen swung her daughter up in her arms. She kissed her little cheek, leaving the second smudge of lip rouge of the evening. “No stage for you, dearest! But you did do a very fine job tonight, Bella.”

Peter rose from the floor, tugged the rather brief skirt of his toga down again, and came to stand beside his wife and daughter. “So fine I believe it merits staying up for supper.”

“Bravo!” Isabella crowed.

Carmen looked up at Peter as he took her arm. She raised her brown eyes inquiringly. “Now do you think?” she whispered.

“Now is quite as good a time as any other. Don’t you agree—Lady Clifton?”

Carmen smiled. “Once more into the breach!” Peter faced the chattering crowd and raised his hand for their attention. A silence fell.

“My friends,” he said. “I—we have a rather surprising announcement to make ...”

Epilogue

“A
nd I pronounce that you be man and wife. Amen.”

Carmen’s hand, newly adorned with a band of diamonds as well as her emerald, trembled in her bridegroom’s grasp, and she was certain she was about to cry. But she blinked the tears away and smiled as she lifted her face for Peter’s kiss.

A kiss that went on for so long, that the good vicar coughed in a delicate disapproval, and Elizabeth and Isabella could be heard giggling from the first pew.

Peter finally drew back and gazed down at her warmly. “Well, Carmen. Do you feel more married than you did ten minutes ago?”

“Not a bit. But this is a lovely moment. Do you feel more married?”

“No. But I did hear that Lizzie’s excellent chef has prepared a lovely lemon cake, so that should make all this wedding folderol worthwhile.”

“Folderol? Do you not recall that this was all
your
idea?”

“Was it? Hm. Perhaps it was.” He stepped back and very politely offered his arm. “Shall we move forth, Lady Clifton?”

“Thank you, Lord Clifton. We shall.”

So they processed down the aisle to the booming strains of the church organ, amid the cheers of the few good friends gathered there in the old Norman church of Clifton Village. In the sunny churchyard, they were quickly surrounded and showered with a fall of rose petals.

“Oh, Carmen!” Elizabeth cried, wiping at her eyes with her lacy handkerchief. “I have never seen a bride so lovely.” She straightened the folds of Carmen’s ivory-colored lace mantilla, which fell from her high comb over her simple ivory satin gown.

“I should be,” Carmen said. “You and Georgina spent hours fussing over me this morning!”

“My mama is the loveliest woman in the world!” Isabella announced, leaning against her father’s leg. She was quite pretty herself, in a new white dress with a pink silk sash. Even her curls were tidy for once, brushed and threaded with a wreath of pink rosebuds.

“Indeed, she is one of the loveliest women in the world,” said Peter, catching his daughter up in his arms and kissing her cheek. “You and your Aunt Elizabeth are the others!”

Isabella giggled.

Elizabeth beamed. “Shall we go back to Evanstone, then? Pierre will pout so if his magnificent wedding breakfast grows cold.”

“Ah, yes. The famous lemon cake. What do you say, my loves?” Peter said. “Shall you ride with us, Bella?”

“Yes!” Isabella shouted. She wriggled down from her father’s arms, and ran toward the flower-bedecked open carriage that awaited them outside the churchyard gates. “Come on!” she called. “All the villagers are lined up along the road to wave to us!”

And Peter and Carmen looked at each other then ran down the pathway amid more rose petals and laughter, to join their daughter and be carried forward to their new life.