The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

across the floor, before slanting toward the rows of expectant faces still seated at the table as surely as a needle on a compass.

The door to the Great Hall swung open and revealed a figure within its Gothic frame.

Bracketed by the bright lunchtime sunshine behind, the figure’s face and hair color were hidden in shadow.

In his seat at the near end of the table, Charlie addressed the newcomer.

“Hello?” he asked.

19. Effie

Lizzie sat very still. Her arms framed her body, clamped to it and rigid; she was anchored by hands that gripped the wooden bench as tightly as claws.

Her eyes were fearful, but as they adjusted to the light, the scenario, the incoming visitor, the strain between them that had caused her delicate brow to rumple into a solitary vertical wrinkle relaxed. Her forehead was ironed smooth once more.

Lizzie breathed out, brought her hands to her chest in a gesture of relief.

“Bertie!” she giggled, and the sound was the first unforced laugh—the first easy, uncomplicated cheeriness—they had heard all day.

Lizzie climbed delicately out from behind the table and made her way toward the rosy-cheeked, ginger-haired man in the doorway. His shirtsleeves were rolled up his forearms; he had a sun hat in one hand, a useless iPhone and a paper map in the other. A small silver suitcase stood by his side.

“What are you doing here?” Lizzie smiled, approached him swift and fleet. She dropped a kiss on each of his cheeks, reached her arms up his solid torso to the height of those wide shoulders and folded the new arrival into a hug.

“Congratulations!” he boomed, his voice a male equivalent of hers—soft but strong, wealthy and well-to-do, but rounded by life. Friendly and guileless.

At first Effie felt a tug of confusion, and she tried, through her hangover, to fathom who he might be speaking to, who he might be congratulating.

When nobody replied, his expectant face fell slightly. “Lizzie, I’m so sorry I’m late,” he offered earnestly. “My plane was delayed….Some kind of bloody electrical storm. I can’t believe I missed it. I’m so so sorry.”

Almost immediately, the truth dawned: he had come for the wedding, the one that was supposed to have happened yesterday—Lizzie’s. And Dan’s.

“You didn’t get the email,” Lizzie gasped. “Oh my God, Bertie, you didn’t get the email!”

There was a pitch of hysteria to her—her throat cracked with emotion and her shoulders began to shake—but it became rapidly obvious, as she leaned on the newly arrived Bertie for support and tried to gasp her next breath, that she was laughing rather than crying.

Effie saw across the table that Charlie’s features had brightened in mischief at the mistake, too; she found her own mouth tugging upward at the unfolding awkward but delicious gaffe that had given them some light relief from their own problems.

“Oh Christ,” said the man Lizzie, now writhing in giggles, was leaning on. “What have I missed?”

He set his belongings down, took a seat at the head of the table, and listened while they explained to him. The fact of the wedding—the textured Provençal invitation had dropped promptly into the chrome mailbox at his apartment block a few months ago—then the undoing of it: an email sent a week ago that he had not received. Their arrival at the Oratoire and what it had contained. The parts they could remember and those they couldn’t. The situation they had found themselves in this morning and the one he had just arrived to, fresh and unburdened.

Effie found that usually, with even the very worst hangover, the fact of relating the events that had led up to it—of spreading the pain, diffusing the shame—could ease some of the next-day anxiety. But explaining the scene to Bertie assuaged none of the nagging culpability she felt.

As they described to him what they had awoken to, Bertie’s face performed an entire routine in mime, from disappointment and suspicion to shock—then sympathy. Simple, earnest worry, and pity, for the woman at the heart of it: Lizzie, his favorite cousin, who he hadn’t seen in a year or more.

“We were so close,” Lizzie said, as if to him but for the benefit of the group once he had been introduced to all of them, in turn, around the table. “But then he got this bloody job so far away, and we never see each other anymore.”

Bertie cleared his throat. “Well, ah, that actually is about to change,” he said with a modest grin. “Because I’m moving back at the end of the summer.”

“Where from?” Anna asked from farther along the table, as though he were one of her witnesses. Effie saw that she was making a character sketch, deciding how useful he might be for the task ahead.

“Shanghai,” he offered. “Seconded there by my firm. Privacy law. That’s why I didn’t know the wedding was off—I didn’t get the email.” He spread his hands and turned to his cousin. “I can’t access that account over there, Liz—the Chinese have got this giant firewall, so I use a different one. Didn’t Mum tell you?”

Lizzie’s exasperated expression told them all they needed to know about how au fait Bertie’s mother was with the tech legislation of the country in which her son worked.

“She only ever shows me your postcards,” she said with a smile, then studied her hands in her lap, morose again.

“I’m so sorry you had to call it off, Lizbet,” he murmured, and reached out to hold one of them.

“We call her that too!” Effie exclaimed. It was the first time she had spoken since Bertie had arrived.

He was looking at her along the table with the sort of friendly compassion she had missed lately. Anna and Lizzie had been so busy these past six months; Effie didn’t blame them for it—it was a fact of thirty-something life. They had done what they could—a couple of nights each with her every week for the first month or so after James had gone. But then, back