Clara held it against her heart, tears running down her cheeks. "My mother brushed my hair with this every night," she said. "One hundred strokes by the fire, every single night."
"I know," said Henry. "Polly told me that, too." He took her hand. "Clara, your hair has grown a great deal this winter."
It had: it was down past her chin now, soft and chestnut and shining. It did not reach her waist—it might not for years—but it was growing a little more every week, like everything else in her life.
"Do you think," Henry said softly, "that it is long enough now for a wedding?"
Clara laughed through her tears. "Yes," she said. "Oh, yes."
They were married on the first of May in the little old church in Ravenshire village, beneath the yew tree where Thomas and Mary Hartley lay at rest.
It was nothing like the great wedding at St. George's: there were no lords in silk, no bishops, no ladies in feathers. Instead, the little church was packed to the rafters with the people who mattered: in the front row sat the Dowager Duchess in her best gray silk, beaming and weeping into a lace handkerchief; beside her sat old Mr. Drummond the banker and Sir Matthew Kendall, the chief magistrate, who said it was the first wedding he had ever cried at.
And behind them, filling every single pew right to the back of the church, sat the servants of Ravenshire Hall—every one of them: Mrs. Pike with her ring of keys polished until it shone; Betsy, already sobbing before the music began; Hannah; Mr. Grant the butler in a brand-new hat; footmen, grooms, kitchen girls, and gardeners, all in their very best clothes, for they had been invited not as servants, but as guests.
The same people who had stood in two long lines in the great hall and watched Lady Cecilia's scissors; the same people who had been too frightened to say a word. Today, they were not silent.
When the church doors opened and the bride appeared, the whole church gasped. Clara wore a simple gown of ivory silk: no pearls, no diamonds. Her chestnut hair fell softly just past her chin, and woven into it was a single ribbon of dark blue silk. Above it, she wore a short veil of fine white lace made from the old cap the Duke had once left on her bed, so carefully cleaned and mended that you would never know it had been thrown into the mud.
Polly walked before her as bridesmaid in a pale pink dress, scattering primroses down the aisle. And under her arm, as always, she carried a ragged old rag doll made of blue cloth.