The vicar was persuaded by ten o'clock.
He arrived at the Peri house with his book and his vestments and the slightly bemused expression of a man who had been asked to perform a wedding on two hours' notice and had decided that the Lord's work did not keep regular hours. Edmund met him at the door in his best coat, which Clara had pressed herself that morning while he stood in the kitchen looking simultaneously terrified and incandescent with a happiness he had no idea what to do with.
"You look very well," Clara told him.
"I feel," Edmund said carefully, "somewhat unlike myself."
"That is how it is supposed to feel," she said. "Go and stand in the parlour."
The parlour had not been arranged for a wedding. There were no flowers, no particular decorations, no careful orchestration of the kind that society weddings required. There was morning light coming through the east window at a good angle, a fire that Edmund had laid himself, and six people — the vicar, the bride and groom, Clara, and her uncle and aunt, who had appeared in the doorway without being asked and taken their places along the wall with the quiet instinct of people who understood, without being told, that this was something they should witness.
Her aunt stood with her hands folded and her expression arranged very carefully, and Clara, watching her from across the room, thought she saw something underneath the arrangement that she recognised from the night before — raw, private, doing its very best not to show.
Martha came downstairs in her good blue dress with her hair pinned neatly and her composure entirely restored, which was such a perfect summation of Martha that Clara felt the back of her throat tighten.
Edmund turned when she came through the door.
The expression on his face was not something Clara tried to describe, even to herself. Some things are not improved by description.
The ceremony was short. The vicar read the words he had read a hundred times and they landed differently here — in this small room, on this particular morning, between these two specific people — than they had presumably ever landed before. Clara stood beside Martha and held her small bouquet of winter roses that Edmund had found somewhere at seven in the morning, which Clara suspected would turn out to have been stolen from a neighbour's garden and did not intend to investigate.
When the vicar reached the vows, Martha's voice was level and clear and entirely steady.
Her eyes, however, were not.
She did not wipe them. She simply let them be, which for Martha was the equivalent of weeping openly, and Edmund noticed and reached over and took her hand before the vicar had finished the sentence, which was not strictly the correct moment but was absolutely the right one.
Clara looked at them and thought about a bench in Kensington Gardens and a woman who had been led there by a spirit she did not understand and had found, ten minutes later, a man with ink on his fingers asking the right question.
She thought: you knew what you were doing. You always knew.
She was not entirely sure which of them she was addressing.
When the vicar said I now pronounce you Clara's uncle made a sound that he immediately converted into a cough, and her aunt looked at the window with great concentration, and Clara herself looked at the ceiling for a moment and breathed very carefully through her nose.
Martha kissed her husband — brief, proper, with a private smile afterward that was for Edmund only — and then turned to Clara.
She did not say anything. She simply took Clara's face in both hands for one moment, the way an older sister might, and looked at her.
Clara covered Martha's hands with her own.
"Take care of him," Clara said. "He forgets to eat when he is busy."
"I know," Martha said. "I have been feeding him for two years."
Clara laughed — a real one, short and unexpected — and Martha smiled properly, and for one moment the morning was just a morning and the parlour was just a parlour and everything was almost all right.
Anthony came at noon.
She met him in the entrance hall and handed him a package — her mother's diary wrapped in cloth, with a letter tucked inside the front cover. He took it without opening it and looked at her.
"Read the letter first," she said. "Then the diary, if you want to understand."
"Clara —"
"It explains things," she said. "About my mother. About me. About —" She stopped. "I wanted someone to know. The whole of it. I wanted it to be you."
He looked at the package in his hands for a long moment. When he looked up his expression was the one she had seen at the palace gate the night before — settled, certain, the compass finding its direction.
"I will read every word," he said.
"I know you will." She looked at him. "That is why it is yours."
He stayed for an hour. They sat in the parlour where the wedding had been and drank tea and talked about small things — his father's garden, a book she had never read that he described in enough detail that she felt she had, the way the winter light looked different in the eastern counties where the estate was.
When he left he paused at the door.
"I will be at the gate tomorrow," he said. "When they come."
"You don't have to —"
"I will be at the gate," he said again, in the tone that meant the conversation was finished.
She let it be finished.
That evening Clara sat at her writing desk in the north-facing room with the candle burning and the wooden horse on the windowsill and her mother's ruby at her throat, and she looked at everything she had arranged and everything she had written and everyone she had tried to leave a little safer than she had found them.
She thought about Eveline Peri on a bench in Kensington Gardens, frightened and alone, and a spirit that had known exactly where to lead her.
She thought: I am not afraid.
Then she corrected herself, honestly, because honesty was the thing she had always tried to manage.
She thought: I am afraid. But I am going anyway.
Outside her window, the city settled into its ordinary evening sounds — carriages and voices and the distant bell of St. Michael's counting the hour. The full moon was tomorrow.
She opened her Bible to the page with the pressed flower and held it in her palm until the petals, ancient and colourless, began to fall apart entirely.
She let them.