Page 10 of The Dravenhearst Brides
“I am.”
Pa rose from his seat. Margaret stood on the wobbly legs of a fawn, hesitant and brand new in the world.
“I’ll send word to him this evening.” Pa offered a weak smile. “Congratulations, Mrs. Dravenhearst.”
She laughed, wholly uncomfortable, and turned to depart. “That will take some getting used to.”
“In time, I’m sure it will suit. If I may give you one final piece of advice?”
Margaret hesitated, one foot already in the hallway. Her fingers curled around the door as she looked back. “You may.”Please.
Her heart ached at the figure her father cut in the lamplight. Sunken, shadowed cheeks. Blue-bruised, veiny hands. His smooth voice now gravelly, permanently hoarse from the never-ending coughing fits that seized him every hour of every day. The currency value of her father’s word skyrocketed the day she learned she would soon lose him.
“Marriage, especially in the early days, is ne’er easy. Tiptoeing around each other, fitting into a new household…these are difficult things.” When her father swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed prominently. His shoulders seemed small, frail beneath the now ill-fitting jacket. He’d lost more weight. “Love takestime, Margaret. In the early days, when it seems but a distant dream, I’ve found friendship is a very good place to start.”
Friendship.
Margaret was starved for it. She hadn’t felt a connective thread tie her to anyone but her father in so very long.
She swallowed thickly. “I’ll remember, Pa.”
4
June 17, 1933
Margaret,
See you at the altar.
I hope you like the flowers.
Yours,
Merrick Dravenhearst
Intheyearsleadingto Margaret’s debut, Vivian Greenbrier had talked incessantly—between swigs of laudanum—about her daughter’s wedding. She’d hoped for early spring, a cloudless day under the dogwood blossoms. She said the church doors would be thrown open, overflowing with society guests. Margaret would have a dress with a train seven feet long—seven feet for biblical divinity, the bedrock of any upstanding debutante marriage. She made Margaret practice ruthlessly for every one of those seven feet, tacking a bedsheet to her backside to demonstrate how to turn without entangling herself. How to walk, straight-backed and tall, up the aisle with posture rigid enough to balance a book atop her head. Even near the end, when the laudanum was truly overcomingher faculties, her mother could somehow always straighten to balance that damn book, hypnotized with delirious fervor at the prospect of Margaret’s fairytale marriage.
Ma said Margaret’s wedding would be the happiest day of her life. Butwhoselife Margaret often wondered—her own or that of her aging, disillusioned mother? A woman who shrank deeper inside herself every passing year, vitality fading to bone fading to shadow, then near the end, to naught more than a whisper.
Nevertheless, Margaret had been raised to believe her wedding would be the stuff of daydreams. But on that fateful morning, when she rose from her bed and opened the curtains, it was not the giddy anticipation of a blushing bride that she felt, but immense trepidation instead.
She did not slip into her wedding gown in a room full of giggling attendants. Her mother did not do up the buttons over her silk-covered back. It was Brigita who carefully pinned the veil in Margaret’s red locks before dropping it over her face without a word.
It was a scorching summer day when her father took her arm outside the chapel, not a single dogwood blossom in sight. The sanctuary doors swept open, the pews inside empty. Barren.
Margaret looked down the aisle through the disorienting lens of her white veil and saw him there, her groom, tall and rather imposing in his black cutaway coat and tails. She focused not on his face as she approached, but on the white magnolia pinned to his lapel, a match to the cascading bouquet in her trembling hands.
“He chose magnolias,” Pa had said when he handed her the spray of flowers with a handwritten note outside the chapel. “It’s the flower of his estate.”
Her father had given her mother a bouquet of blue hydrangeas on their wedding day, plucked from the bushes that surrounded the sprawling country mansion at Greenbrier Estates. Ma showed Margaret the pressedtrimmings once, carefully tucked and dried between the pages of the Book of Psalms. A gilded memory preserved with tenderness and care.
As the ceremony began, Margaret continued staring at Dravenhearst’s lapel, at the magnolia near her eye level. She wondered faintly if she should preserve cuttings from her own bouquet? If she dared believe this moment, these flowers, might one day mean somethingmore.
She blinked in surprise when Dravenhearst’s fingers brushed her veil, lifting it over her head. It was time for the vows. Margaret was so nervous, she could hardly focus. She raised her eyes to her groom’s face. His pupils were dilated, black almost overtaking brown.
“I, Merrick,” he began, “take you, Margaret, to be my wedded wife.” He paused to swallow, his tongue darting out to lick dry lips. It was the only hint betraying possible nerves, for his voice was deep and smooth, his hands warm and steady where they held hers. “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
He did not blink once as he spoke, simply held Margaret’s gaze, pouring deeper and deeper into her with every line. She knew not if he meant a single word, but it certainlyfeltlike he did. He was as hypnotic as the devil himself, whispering sacred honeyed promises beneath the apse of the sanctuary. It was shockingly intimate, the room around them blurring at the edges, a hazy rainbow prism of stained glass. The spell broke only when his lips stopped moving.
