"Do you know," he said, watching the square pass by the window, "I have never been able to see this street in the rain since without thinking of you."
"Is that why you asked to come this way tonight?"
"Partly." He reached into his coat and drew out a small velvet box, and Marianne's breath caught before he'd even opened it. "I have spent a great deal of the last year trying to think of some clever way to ask you this, something worthy of how we met, and I have concluded there is no cleverness required. You asked me in this very carriage what I wanted, when no one else had thought to ask in longer than I could remember. I want you. I have wanted you since before I understood what I was feeling had a name. Will you marry me, Marianne?"
She did not answer immediately—not from hesitation, but because she found, for one of the only times in their acquaintance, that she had no words at all, only the fullness of her own heart pressing up against her throat. She nodded first, and then found her voice and said yes twice, as though once could not possibly carry the whole of it.
Her father, when they told him, took a long moment before he spoke—the same careful, weighing look he'd given Julian the first time they'd met properly.
"I don't suppose there's any use in me pretending I ever expected this for her," he said finally. "But I've watched you with her a year now, and I've never once seen you make her smaller to fit anyone's expectations of what she ought to be. That's more than I can say for most men of your rank, and considerably more than I hoped for, if I'm honest." He extended his hand a second time, and this time there was nothing formal in it at all. "Take care of her."
"I intend to spend the rest of my life proving I mean to."
She married him, in the end, in front of a considerably smaller and warmer gathering than the one that had driven her out into the rain the night they met. Her father gave her away with damp eyes he pretended were from the weather. The baker's wife from Chandler's Row sat near the front in her Sunday best, having been invited by Julian himself with a note that simply read: You were right to be careful with me. I hope you'll allow me to prove I was worth trusting.
Cordelia Vane and her husband sat among the guests as well, having become unexpectedly genuine friends to them both in the year since their tangled engagements had come undone. Cordelia had written to Marianne more than once that spring, half in jest, that she considered herself something of an accidental matchmaker, having been too sensible to marry a man who so plainly belonged to someone else.
Even the Dowager Duchess attended, seated in the front row beside Lord Vane in a truce neither family had quite expected to hold this long—her expression, if not entirely warm, at least resigned to the fact that her son had chosen a wife who made him happier than any boundary dispute ever could have. She had, in fact, called on Marianne privately a week before the wedding—an unannounced visit that had unsettled the whole household until it became clear the Dowager had come not to object, but in her own stiff and unpracticed way to make peace, presenting Marianne with a small brooch that had belonged to Julian's grandmother, and saying only, "He has not laughed as freely in years as he has since he met you. I find I cannot argue with that, whatever else I might have wished for him."