She was dressed entirely in black.
Not the grey of half-mourning or the lavender that some widows thought becoming. Black bombazine, dull as slate, to the throat and the wrists. A black spencer. A bonnet trimmed with black crape, and from it a veil of black crape that fell to her shoulders and hid her face. Her gloves were black. In her hand she held no flowers but a folded paper.
For a moment nobody breathed. Then the whisper started at the back, ran up the nave like fire up a curtain, and broke into open voices. Somebody laughed—a short, shocked bark, at once hushed. A child asked loudly whether the lady was a witch. Sir Digby Rendell rose to his feet.
The bride began to walk.
She came up the middle of the nave at an even pace, neither hurried nor slow, her heels sounding on the stone and the brasses of the old dead Ferrands. She did not look to either side. When she reached the chancel step, where the rector stood frozen with his book open on his hands, she did not stop before him. She turned, to the astonishment of everyone in the church, toward the north aisle.
Toward Ivo.
He straightened from the pillar without knowing he had done it. She stopped before him, an arm's length away, and put back her veil with one hand, and he saw the face he had seen last night over the old man's head: pale, narrow, composed, with straight dark brows and grey eyes that were now red-rimmed and perfectly dry.
She sank into a deep curtsey, the curtsey given to a peer of the realm, and held it.
"Your Grace," said Rosamund Quarrie.
It took him a long moment. Afterward he was ashamed of how long. Then the words found their meaning, and the floor of the church seemed to tilt very slightly under him, the way a causeway tilts when the peat beneath it shifts.
"When?" he said.