Lucy’s desire as a young bride was to look both virginal yet grand, and she felt she’d managed to pull that off with the gown she’d made for herself. The candlelight satin, pleated and draped in front and blooming in back over a bustle, was enhanced by a lace train attached to her forehead circlet of late rose blossoms. The train of the skirt pulled several feet of scallop-hemmed and embroidered skirt. The effect, she knew from staring at herself for hours in a full-length looking glass, was to make her seem to float down the aisle.
In truth, she felt she dragged. Her eyes were still rimmed with red from sobbing herself to sleep.
“Oh, Nellie, what have I done? I hardly know him.” She’d admitted her worst fears to her sister last night. Nellie had sat on the bench at the foot of Lucy’s bed while Lucy paced in a swirl of skirts from her night robe. “I know James drinks too much, but so do a lot of men. At least he’s never sloppy or loud about it. Well, now that he’s settling down at last and declared his undying love, he’ll have to change some of his ways,” she’d insisted, hitting a fist repeatedly into the palm of her other hand. “I know Mr. Kennedy only got worse, but—well, at least James has money. He wants a son, and he’s observed more than once that girls seem to run in our family, but he loves me anyway.”
Nellie had tried to comfort her, but she’d been listening and nodding. Finally, they’d lain down on the bed in exhausted silence and held hands. In her heart, in the quiet, Lucy had vowed to forget her foolish first love and be a good wife to her husband.
“Lucile Christiana,” the presiding vicar’s voice intoned as James held her hand, jolting her back to the present, “do you solemnly pledge . . .”
Things seemed to be happening around her but not to her. It was like a dream, like that drama Nellie had described with Sarah Bernhardt as Theodora who had drunk a love potion and then fallen madly in love with the first man she saw. Like a tragedy, only one where everyone did not end up dead on the stage.
Strangely, when the service was over and they turned to face the small gathering of family and friends—more his than hers—as she paraded with James down the aisle with Nellie and her two other bridesmaids behind her, she had a strange idea, almost a vision, one that hardly seemed suitable on her wedding day, but that gave her hope nonetheless. She could show these people a parade of women wearing her designs and that she could create frocks and gowns not only for Mother, Nellie, and herself, but for others.
She’d met a lovely couple near where they were to live, really their landlords for the house, and they’d been most kind. There they were, seated in the second pew, nodding at her and James, Lord Fitzharding so short and thin and Lady Fitzharding so huge a woman—Jack Sprat and his wife, Nellie had whispered after she’d met them. Could she dare to hope someone of the peerage would wear her designs? Lady Fitzharding was smiling so broadly at her.
But, oh no, Mother was crying.
Lucy considered the wedding night more than a disappointment. If she were honest with herself, it was a disaster. She had imagined being slowly wooed and worshipped, but instead James was rushed and impatient. Perhaps she should have expected as much, given his behavior before the wedding, but even a hint of Nellie’s fragile, fanciful ideas of storybook romance would have been nice. Perhaps James thought he had now moved from adoration to ownership.
Still, this was marriage. But it wasn’t long after breakfast that James downed his first drink of the day, and it was not fruit juice or tea. “I thought,” he said—when he’d said precious little of what he’d thought on their wedding night, except that her body looked like alabaster—“that we’d enjoy a wedding trip later and just settle into our new home this first month or so.”
“You said I could decorate it fashionably, but I suppose I should wait on that.”
“I have the money, now, darling, so ‘fashion’ away. I’m glad to see the autumn weather’s holding. We’ll want to take some brisk walks with the hunt dogs. But the sky’s the limit when you get to London to buy curtain goods or upholstery fabric or whatever. And, remember, you can purchase a few new frocks instead of sewing your own. No need for that anymore.”
“But I love sketching and sewing them, not only for me but for Mother and Nellie.”
“I want to see them well dressed, too, of course. But, as pretty as your dresses and gowns are, I can’t have someone of our gentrified station—perhaps with the best yet to come—laboring like a seamstress. We’ll be out in the Fitzharding set now. So glad they’ve taken a fancy to you and your sister. Your mama tries to be agreeable, but I don’t think she’s weathering losing you as well as I thought she would. I’ll win her over, just as I did you—you’ll see,” he said and poured another glass of liquor from the sideboard.
“Lucy,” Nellie said, looking round the sitting room at Cranford Park two months after the wedding, “I adore your friends here, especially the kindly Fitzhardings. And what you’ve done with these rooms—absolutely spiffing!”
“I’m glad you enjoy them at least—as does Lady Fitzharding. James really doesn’t care one way or the other, though he likes me to make him proud and he basks in any compliments I receive. But he’s balked at paying some of the bills when he told me to spend away, anything I wanted.”
They sat on the mauve-silk and golden-tasseled Louis XIV–style divan. Nellie knew Lucy had an upset stomach and, with the holidays coming soon, it had crimped her style. James had gone off without her today, shooting whatever birds were available now. Nellie knew she could have accompanied him to the outdoor luncheon in place of Lucy, but it was nippy out, and she’d worried that Lucy looked so shaky she might heave up her breakfast, meager as it was of tea, toast, and honey.
“This room is almost my ideal of a romantic bower—an escape to the past,” Nellie said, hoping to perk Lucy up. “I adore the way you’ve draped the ceiling so beautifully that it seems we are in a summer tent with all these silk ribbon roses you’ve made. The pretty china plates and flowered rug are so sweet I can almost smell the blossoms.”
“Coming from you, the queen of old-fashioned romance, a great compliment.”
“Well, as James has teased me more than once, since he knows I often read about royalty, his middle name is Stuart. But I told him, one of them had his head chopped off.”
“Nellie, neither of us are good at this but—” Here she popped up and made for a rose-patterned porcelain ewer she had on display at the piano she loved to play. She sat on the piano bench and propped the ewer on her lap and looked into it, as if she had something hidden there.
“Neither of us are good at what?” Nellie asked. “I’ve never decorated a room in my life, only arranged the few things I have, but I’d like to. I imagine I would do it up quite exotically, something inspired by the scenery from Bernhardt’s Theodora. I’ve been keeping extensive journals, you know. The Fitzhardings have been so kind not only to you but to me, admiring my stories and the caricature sketches I’ve made of them and their friends, so—”
“I don’t mean decorating,” Lucy interrupted, her voice shaky. It was as if she had not been listening at all. “Dear Lord, I meant that, after but these few months married, I think I’m pregnant. Worse, I don’t want to be.”
She retched into the ewer and collapsed onto the piano keys with a dissonant chord.
Nellie hurried to her, put one arm around her shoulders and one hand on her forehead, while Lucy vomited into the ewer again.
“Oh. Oh dear—dearest,” Nellie managed, whipping her handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe her sister’s face. “I’ll summon your lady’s maid.”
“That bell cord—there,” she said, pointing. “Violets on it. Tha—that one.”
Silk violets and roses and pregnant, Nellie thought. Poor Lucy wasn’t happy, didn’t want a child now, or at least James’s child. And just when Mother was getting resigned to the marriage, especially since the rented house was nice and James and Lucy had been taken in by a lord and lady, and James had seemed—sometimes, that is—to have money.
Nellie pulled the correct cord twice and hurried back to sit on the piano bench with her arm around Lucy. Nellie glanced out the window through the flower-patterned curtains into the distance. James was walking back with one of the Fitzhardings’ footmen, who was carrying a slew of dead birds. And James was drinking from a small metal flask.
Oh drat! Suddenly Mother’s worries about James’s drinking seemed justified. At least he was with a man, not a woman, so Nellie hoped his womanizing reputation Mother fretted over was not true. But with Lucy pregnant and disheartened, Nellie would have to keep any of the bounder’s secret she learned, at least for now.
Nellie knew she was learning a good but hard lesson. Mixing matrimony and men seemed more than dangerous and dim-witted—it could be disastrous.
“Lucy insisted on a French name for the child,” James groused to Nellie when he came back in from seeing his newborn daughter months later. “Es-may, spelled E-s-m-e. Never heard it before,” he muttered and took a swig from a silver pocket flask, though Nellie knew by his tone and expression that it was hardly a congratulatory toast. Everyone knew James had wanted a son. “Whatever does Lucy have to do with France?” he asked and banged out of the sitting room off Lucy’s bedroom where the baby had been born after nearly twenty hours of labor.
He was barely gone a moment and came back in. As much as Nellie had appreciated him letting Mother and her visit here—she now preferred to stay with the Fitzhardings nearby—he had thoroughly upset her.
Before he could say another word, she told him, “She picked a French name because we have a proud French heritage through our Canadian grandmama. We still have relatives near Paris, as you well know. And please stop shouting. You told her if it wasn’t a son, she could choose the name.”
“That aside, is it true what I heard yesterday?” he demanded, all too obviously switching topics as he did when bored or cornered. “About your turning down that millionaire who took a fancy to you on top of refusing the hand of the Duke of Newcastle last spring? A duke! Hell, Queen Elinor, you could have been a duchess and helped us all up the damned social ladder. Granted the duke was an old man—”
“And I’ve noted from observation somewhere that a marriage can be ill served by huge differences in the ages of the couple. I’m barely beyond twenty to his lofty sixty years, but on this day which should be so happy here for the birth of your child—”
“Listen, Nellie,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “I know your clever comments and sketches of people amuse the Fitzhardings and their friends, but you don’t amuse me. Do you intend to keep living off your poor mother—or that curmudgeon Kennedy—the Fitzhardings, or me?”
“I’ll make my own way. I’d rather jump into the sea than wed someone I don’t love like the duke or that wealthy acquaintance you hauled in here with his yacht. I knew someone once who married for a yacht and a grand escape, and she ended up badly.”
“Say no more!” he said, holding up a hand and the flask toward her as if to ward her off. “I don’t do battles with words. I prefer to love rather than fight!”
Nellie gave an inelegant snort. Oh yes, Lucy might be the one with the strongest spine in the past, but she could fend for herself now. “I realize you’d rather love—or your form of so-called love,” she hissed, fighting to keep her voice down so Lucy and Mother would not hear from the other side of the door. “I’ve heard about your dancing and singing friends in town.”
“And you’ve kept your mouth closed for once, I take it, since Lucy never mentioned that.” He pretended to applaud her, one hand against his flask. “Look, Elinor the great,” he said, lowering his voice too and stalking toward her, though she stood her ground. “All Lucile Christiana Sutherland Wallace adores is thinking up pretty things like room decorations and dresses. She wasn’t even enamored of having my child, as far as I can tell.”
“She will be a good mother to Esme.”
“How about being the wife I need? Going shooting or watching me fish? Not spending so much money on fabric and bibelots and knickknacks,” he said with such a sweeping gesture around the room that some of his liquor sloshed out to mar two silk throw pillows in a slash of darker blue.
“You courted and wooed her. You knew what she was like from the start! Maybe the world would be the better for it if the woman would choose and propose.”
“That’s the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard come out of your pretty mouth,” he said and wiped the back of his hand across his own.
She stared hard at him. He acted as if he’d say more, do more, then he slammed out of the room again.
Though Nellie felt weak-kneed, she did not collapse, but went over to the sitting room door to the upstairs hall and firmly turned the key to lock him out.