"People who choose to marry in early April can hardly expect good weather," the Duchess of Denver said with undisguised satisfaction as she surveyed the rain pouring down on the evening before her sister-in-law's wedding.
Mary irritated her by glancing out of the window with superb indifference. "Oh dear, it's positively torrential", she said cheerfully. "I'm afraid we'll have to have everyone in the Great Hall for the whole of the reception, after all. What a bore for the servants."
Helen looked at Mary with distaste, considering this refusal to let the weather temper her attitude of perfect happiness to be frankly rather brazen.
"I think it's going to stop," said St George, taking hold of his aunt and waltzing skittishly around the room with her with all the irrepressible boisterousness of fifteen. "It'll be a perfectly ripping day and after all the boring parts are over - sorry Aunt Mary, you know what I mean - we shall have cricket on the west lawn, you'll see."
Mary laughed and disentangled herself from his rather inexpert hold. "I hadn't thought of it in that light, Jerry. I really shall be disappointed if it carries on raining, now that I know that nuptial cricket would have been on offer if it were dry."
The family and the assorted guests who had already come down to stay in readiness for the wedding the next day were assembled in the drawing room, somewhat at a loose end. That frenetic energy was over the house which always descends when there is a great deal to do, and which makes it impossible for anyone to relax, even those to whom none of the tasks have been assigned. Helen, who had taken the larger part of the organising upon herself, had spent the past week bustling around in a frenzy of self-importance, refusing the offers of assistance heaped upon her as if those making them could have no possible idea of the complexity of the tasks they so vaingloriously imagined they could be involved in.
"Well, it makes things exceptionally difficult not knowing," Helen said now, glaring at Mary as though the unpredictability of the English weather - which is after all quite as pronounced in summer as in spring - were her fault. Mary beamed back. She was grateful to Helen for all the organising, her own interest in the wedding residing in only two things: the clothes, and the fact that after it she would be Charles's wife.
At that moment, a servant came into the room and walked over to Mary. "If you please, my lady, Freeman's come from the Dower House to let you know that Mr Parker's arrived there. The Dowager Duchess thought you might like to know."
Mary laughed, with happiness rather than amusement. "I'm delighted to hear it," she replied. "I'll run down and have a quick word with him. There's something I keep forgetting to ask him."
"Aunt Mary, you can't see him the night before the wedding!" Winifred sounded scandalised. "That's awfully bad luck, isn't it?"
"Is it?" Mary said, vaguely, continuing out of the room into the vast hallway undeterred, and Helen's gimlet eyes were left to glare their displeasure at her sister-in-law's retreating back.
At the Dower House, the Dowager Duchess and Peter were entertaining Mrs and Miss Parker. Ahasuerus had fortunately taken to Dulcie, and was sitting complacently on her lap. "That's a most unusual compliment! But what a shame about your very pretty skirt, my dear," the Dowager Duchess said, "because his fur does come out in such swathes you know, particularly in the spring. Leave it outside your door and Maria shall give it a good brush this evening."
This mark of favour from the member of the household who was very clearly the most revered at the Dower House went a long way to restoring Dulcie's courage after the ordeal of dinner at Duke's Denver. Everybody had been kind, apart from Gerald who had forgotten who they were and been confused, and Helen, whose condescending and over-scrupulous politeness had been, intentionally, more dismaying than any rudeness. But the sheer number of people, the extraordinary grandeur of the meal and the setting, and the effort of not seeming to be as over-awed as they were, had been wearing for both the Parkers. However Peter and the Dowager Duchess behaved with perfect naturalness, letting it be understood without actually criticising Helen, that her opinion was to be cheerfully dismissed by all right thinking people. The Parkers had arrived the day before, Dulcie having decided that her mother would simply have to have a complete day to rest between the journey and the wedding (despite the disadvantages of arriving before Charles, who was circumscribed by the limited amount of time he could take off work) and their initial awkwardness had been largely assuaged by Lord Peter and the Dowager's welcome.
"We're so very pleased to see you," the Dowager had said simply as they emerged from Peter's car, which had picked them up at the railway station, looking anxious and slightly travel sick. "Both for your own sake and because we really are so very fond of Charles." And the first difficult hour had been passed in Lord Peter and the Dowager each happily reminiscing about their first encounters with Charles, until the Parkers had felt that though they may be in an alien world, at least they were not amongst strangers. When Lady Mary had run down, as she called it, from Duke's Denver later that day, though, their apprehensions had re-emerged. Mary had deliberately dressed quite simply, but there was about her such grace and delicacy that she struck them as more intimidating than either the Dowager Duchess or Lord Peter. There was also of course the fact that she was a prospective daughter or sister-in-law, rather than someone who would become a distant relation by marriage, making the bridge to be crossed far wider.
Mary had pressed each of their hands, shyly. She herself felt somewhat intimidated, in particular by the tall and infinitely sensible looking Dulcie. Charles's sister was ten years older than he was, and he ten years older than Mary so there was a generation between the two women. Mary felt that she must appear extremely insubstantial, and felt at a disadvantage by meeting them for the first time at the Dower House, with all its quiet splendour and luxury. She longed for an opportunity to show them that despite her nobility she could in fact be a useful kind of person, too.
Tea time at the Dower House was hardly the situation to provide any opportunities to do so, however, so Mary had instead asked courteous questions about their journey, and genuinely interested questions about Barrow-in-Furness. She and Charles were to visit his mother and sister for a day and a night at the end of their honeymoon, on their way from a week in the Lake District, and the place which, though he hadn't lived there for twenty years, was so much a part of Charles, held a compulsive fascination for her. Mrs Parker's replies had been stilted and Dulcie had barely spoken, but they all finished the tea feeling that a tentative feeling of connection and liking had been established. "I like her, though it's not really a question of liking or not," Dulcie had remarked later to her mother, in the privacy of the room allocated to her mother for the stay. "It's more a question of whether we'll be able to know her. She seems such a study of good manners and good looks and deportment, it's hard to see a way into her, if you see what I mean." Mrs Parker had considered. "I know what you mean, lass. I suppose it must be a disadvantage of being beautiful, that. Hard for other people to see what you're really about. Ah well, time will tell." If truth be told, had Mary been less pretty, Mrs Parker would have warmed to her more. Both women had an honest hardworking distrust of an excess of beauty. Their doubts as to how suitable a wife she could make him were lulled into abeyance, but had not yet been dispelled.
They continued to be charmed by Lord Peter and the Dowager Duchess, however, and the next day Dulcie and the Dowager were deep in a discussion of different techniques for binding rugs when Charles arrived at last, long after dinner. He was delighted to see his mother and sister, and touched at finding them so well looked after. He still felt slightly out of place at the Dower House, too rough and solid for its elegance, but to his relations he seemed impossibly at home there. The Dowager Duchess twinkled about arranging for him to be brought some supper, and he had just eaten it and was telling Dulcie affectionately about Mary's newly developed omelet-making skills, when a servant came in. "Mr Parker, Sir, Lady Mary's at the door and says she won't come in but could you spare a minute for a quick word."
Dulcie would have protested along the same lines as Winifred, but Charles had shot out of his seat with astonishing rapidity and had already left the room.
Mary stood in the dark on on the bottom of the wide, sweeping steps that led to the main entrance of the Dower House, holding a large umbrella. As Charles's eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that she was looking up at him with a shy smile, and at the sweetness of her he almost fell to his knees. "Come in out of the rain," he said, shakily. Mary shook her head.
"No, I can't. I've still to pack my case. And it reminded me that I still haven't asked you about your preference for night attire? For a woman, I mean."
Charles stared at her uncomprehendingly. He didn't follow, but much more pressingly, it was unbearable not to touch her. He stepped out into the driving rain.
"Charles!" Mary laughed and stretched up her arm to reach the umbrella over him. Seeing that this couldn't be comfortable, Charles took the umbrella and held it over them both. He held her firmly to him and though the rain poured all around them, they were dry and warm, cocooned together in a sea of dark. He kissed her, once and then again and then a third time. "What is it you wanted to ask me?", he said, and kissed her a fourth time.
"Oh! Yes. I'd quite forgotten. Which would you rather I wore - a nightgown or pyjamas?"
Charles appeared to give the matter serious thought (indeed the question was quite an arresting one for a man who had never even contemplated the possibility of a woman wearing pyjamas), and then replied with great earnestness, "In cold temperatures, of course you must wear whichever you yourself prefer, and I'm sure you'll be equally beguiling in either. But for myself, all other things being equal, I'd much rather you wore neither."
This answer did not help at all with Mary's packing decisions, but it nonetheless prompted her to wind her arms around Charles and kiss him with considerable fervour. It was the sort of embrace which inevitably led to the discomfort of unfulfilled desire for Charles but there was no frustration in this now, just gratitude that the day had so nearly come at last, and that this was the last night of his life in which Mary would not be his. Mary sighed happily and then took the umbrella from him. "Good night, Charles," she said, and she disappeared into the night. Many seconds had passed before Charles realised that he was standing staring after her in the rain with no coat, hat or umbrella, and hastened back into the house, avoiding the eye of the footman who closed the door after him.
The expression on Charles's face as he came back into the drawing room, as well as his dripping wet hair, conveyed a great deal to his best friend as well as to his mother and sister. Lord Peter correctly surmised that to ask what Mary had come about was not likely to lead to edifying family conversation, and he smoothly led the conversation onto the ever reliable topic of the weather. To Mrs Parker, who had not yet seen her son and his fiancée together, the look of star-eyed delight on Charles's face was instructive. She could not fail to read the depth of emotion in her quiet, endlessly dutiful son's face. He had never claimed happiness for himself, and this woman had given it to him in unimaginable abundance. Besides, she had heard what Charles had told his sister about Mary's omelet-making. Mrs Parker's doubts were gone.