His lungs were on fire.
Gregory Bridgerton was running. Through the streets of London, oblivious to the curious stares of onlookers, he was running.
There was a strange, powerful rhythm to his movements—one two three four, one two three four—that pushed him along, propelling him forward even as his mind remained focused on one thing and one thing only.
The church.
He had to get to the church.
He had to stop the wedding.
The opening scene of this this novel situates the reader right into the middle of a scene the title promises. This cannot help but strike the reader at some level as being, somehow, a little off. This mad rush to stop a wedding is a scene so familiar it has become a trope. Whether it’s Dustin Hoffman banging on a large plate glass window inside a church or the entire plot of Bubble Boy, getting to the church in time to prevent the bride (usually) from marrying the wrong man is a plot device everybody knows is the climax that ends the story, not the event which stimulates the story. So, either this is a quick flash-forward before the narrative resorts to a long flashback or the author seeking to subvert the trope.
Two months earlier
Unlike most men of his acquaintance, Gregory Bridgerton believed in true love.
He’d have to have been a fool not to.
Consider the following:
His eldest brother, Anthony.
His eldest sister, Daphne.
His other brothers, Benedict and Colin, not to mention his sisters, Eloise, Francesca, and (galling but true) Hyacinth, all of whom—all of whom—were quite happily besotted with their spouses.
Of course, there is also a third possibility. Maybe the opening mad rush to stop the wedding is both a flash-forward and a subversion of the familiar which seeks to upset expectations of the conventional. The rush to the stop the wedding occurs in the Prologue and it ends on a note of ambiguity. Having succeeded in getting to the church on time and expressing his undying love to the unnamed bride about to marry another man, he proposes. Lips trembling, she opens her mouth says…something. But what that something is will have to wait.
And so Chapter 1 answers part of the mystery with its opening words indicating that rush to the wedding will not take place for another two months. The reader has been thrust into a flashback and though certainly one expects that the reply which remains a mystery will have to be affirmative, who can be sure? If the author is willing to open her book with the kind of scene that usually comes at the end, maybe subversion runs deeper. What if the answer to Gregory’s proposal is actually…no?
Lucinda Abernathy, better known to, well, everyone who knew her, as Lucy, stifled a groan as she turned to the gentleman who had crept up on her, presumably to make calf eyes at Hermione, as did, well, everyone who met Hermione.
Which famous movie about a bride marrying the wrong man—or, at least, offering that presumption—best fits this version of the stop the wedding trope: The Graduate or My Best Friend’s Wedding. This particular quote is at the center of the particular dilemma. As one might expect by this point, the author is being a little cagey with her story. Opening with the typical climax, teasing the reader by withholding names and answers to important questions and then tossing everything into a flashback are, it turns out, where this trickery ends.
The scene here presents two women who are friends in the stereotypical dyad of the dating scene: one is the beautiful siren who attracts all the men and the other isn’t. Needless to say, Gregory Bridgerton is a man. And he is a man whose eyes have just discovered “the breathtaking perfect curve of” the neck of a woman with blonde hair. Before jumping to conclusions, it may be important to add here that Lucy is only “a little less blond” than Hermione.
