A Bride for the Prizefighter: A Victorian Romance

With a start, she realized their vows had ended.
“Give ‘er a kiss then, Nye!” called out a raucous voice.
“Fuck off, Jeb,” came her new husband’s surly reply, as he turned away and stalked back down the aisle, leaving her open-mouthed and deeply shocked at his profanity in a sacred place.  The congregation, such as it was erupted into hilarity, as though for all the world he had uttered some grand jest.  Mina turned back toward the vicar with flaming cheeks, but Reverend Ryland was feigning a deaf ear as he fussily moved his bookmark and closed his Bible.
“Good luck to you, madam,” he said with pursed lips, casting his eyes heavenward.
“She’ll need more than luck,” Jeremy predicted with a short laugh.  The place was rapidly emptying now as people jostled and bustled out of the pews, almost falling over each other in their haste to follow the bridegroom back out of the church.
Mina whirled around, glared at her half-brother, and then started hastily back up the aisle.  What was she supposed to do?  Where was she supposed to go?  She only knew one certainty and that was that she was being left behind.  She had only managed a few steps when she stumbled over her own unfastened shoe, as her stockinged foot came out of it.  She had to grab at the back of a nearby wooden pew to stop herself from tumbling into a heap on the floor.
Suppressing a sob, Mina cast down her posy of flowers and tore the shabby veil from her head.  She would not cry, not in front of this ill-bred rabble.  Sinking down onto the floor, she made a grab for her shoe and pulled it on, as the silver sixpence fell out.
“Come now,” came Lord Faris’s mocking voice.  “Don’t tell me the erstwhile schoolmistress is so summarily defeated by a few sundry whores and villains.  And you named after the goddess of wisdom and strategy.”
Mina yanked her shoelaces tight as she did her best to gather the scraps of her lost dignity about her.  “Go away, Jeremy,” she said in a voice that shook with anger.
He gave a low laugh.  “And just how do you propose to return to The Harlot without me?”
“If I must return to that loathsome place, then I shall walk,” she told him through gritted teeth.
“If you must?” he echoed, sounding vastly amused.  “My dear sister, is it possible it escaped your notice that you are now the landlady and proprietress of that establishment?”
Between her nerveless fingers, Mina’s shoelace snapped.
4
Mina hobbled around the last bend in the road and leaned heavily against part of a fallen-down stone wall.  She had a blister on one heel and was out of breath from the steady uphill climb.  She fanned her hot face with her bonnet, which she had finally found, lying under a wooden bench, sadly crushed and dented.  No doubt it had been trampled underfoot in the hasty exodus from the church.  Her hair was coming down around her ears in straggling rat’s tails and even in this light she could discern streaks of mud at the hem of her skirts.  She had long since discarded the delphiniums by pitching them over a stone wall, though Effie’s makeshift scarf was still draped around her neck as likely the redhead would want it back.  The silver sixpence she had tucked into her hidden pocket, resisting the impulse to fling it after her bouquet.  She could not afford such gestures, she told herself sensibly, even though it did seem an unlucky charm to have about her.
Looking on the bright side, she could at least see the faint lamplight ahead of her from the inn and hear the squeak of its sign swinging to and fro.  At the beginning of her climb, she had caught snatches of faint laughter and voices on the path ahead of her, but they had fallen off after a while, leaving her alone to plod on in pitch-black darkness, prey to her own fears.  In the distance, she thought she could hear the crash and boom of the sea over the cliffs, but she had not yet caught a glimpse of it.
Who even knew what horrors could lie in wait for her on such a lonely stretch of road?  She shivered, thinking of highwaymen and goodness only knew what.  Foolish Mina, she upbraided herself, drawing her cloak tighter around her.  Afraid of goblins, pixies, and ghosts when you’re a grown woman and should know it is beasts of flesh and blood that pose the biggest risk.  One, in particular, sprung to mind and she dashed a forearm across her eyes.
They were tears of thwarted anger, she told herself hastily, that kept filling her eyes.  Nothing else and certainly not self-pity.  She had wanted to rail and scream at the aggravating Lord Faris, but of course, she had not.  Sometimes being raised a perfect lady felt like a real burden.  Try as she might, it did not seem to come to her as naturally as it had to dearest Mama.
She tried to imagine now, what Mama would have done if she had been left to tramp miles on foot, alone in the dark, scorned by her own wedding party, and failed.  Papa would never have treated her mother in such a fashion.  Indeed, he had always shown the most tender-hearted solicitude and consideration toward his spouse.  But Nye was as different a man from her own father as chalk and cheese.  In truth, she had no-one else to compare him to, she thought having never met such manner of man before.
She wondered what flaming redhead Effie would have done if her ‘man’ had left her like that at the altar, humiliating her in front of all gathered there.  Probably screamed and cursed like a fishwife, Mina thought with envy.  She would likely have flown at him and clawed his eyes