The next day passes in a whirlwind of activity. Mary comes, and while I make suggestions for her future, I can tell none of them are what she wants. I offer to help set her up in a proper dress shop, but there isn’t enough of a market for it in High Thornesbury, and she doesn’t want to move away. I offer to hire her to sew our baby clothes and a new post-pregnancy wardrobe for me, which is great, but what comes after that?
She listens to my suggestions and tells me they’re very good and she’ll pay them proper consideration. But I hear the hesitation in her words. I see her disappointment, too. It’s not as if she’s asked for something outrageous. Just a modest position that we’ll need filled anyway. My reluctance must feel like rejection, no matter how much I assure her it is no reflection on her.
After my dress fitting, Mary takes the gown into another room to make alterations. Once the dress is done, it’s time to get ready. Mary helps with that, as she did the night of my private ball with William. I might argue that I don’t need a maid, but for an evening out, Victorian style demands at least one extra pair of hands. As Mary helps, she temporarily forgets her disappointment, and begins chattering away, sharing all the local gossip.
It takes nearly two hours to get ready. First come all the layers of dress, made that much more difficult by my belly. I’m thankful I’m only six months along. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to find formal dress if I were in my eighth month. I suppose the answer there is that if I were in my eighth month, I wouldn’t be going to a ball. I have a feeling I should enjoy this side of the stitch as much as I can over the holidays, because not long into the new year, I’ll want to be in the twenty-first century, where no one will blink at me going out in public with a basketball under my shirt.
Once I’m dressed, it’s time for primping—the makeup and the hair and the jewelry. Tonight I wear the Thorne jewels. The necklace is a huge sapphire pendant circled with diamonds, more diamonds hanging from it. Even the chain is encrusted in diamonds. The ring is gold inlaid with a large sapphire flanked by diamonds. And the bracelet, not surprisingly, is more diamonds and more sapphires.
A fortune in jewels, passed from generation to generation, a symbol of continuity and former wealth, a reminder that the Thornes are a very old and very close-knit family. When his parents’ debt had been at its worst, William had been on the brink of doing the unthinkable: selling a piece of the set. That’s when he concocted the desperate ploy of using what little capital he had left to invest in the future I’d described. Now I hold the jewels in trust for the next generation.
When I’m finally dressed and ready, I look in the mirror and my breath catches, as it did the first time I saw myself in a proper ballgown. There’s a fantasy fulfilled here, one featured in a thousand historical-romance novels, our intrepid young heroine dressing for the ball where she will meet the man of her dreams.
At thirty-nine, I don’t quite fit that “young heroine” mold. I’m a middle-aged, very pregnant widow on her second marriage. And yet my story is at least as magical as any in those books I loved. I have married the man of my dreams twice. When Michael died at thirty, I thought that was it for me, even if “remarrying” was on the list of things he wanted for me . . . right after “have countless torrid affairs.” The affairs never happened. The remarriage did, though, to the man who first captured my heart.
Mine might not be a standard romance story, but it is an incredible one that I am incredibly lucky to be living. Married to the man I thought I lost, starting a family after I assumed that opportunity had passed from my life. I have a home, a family, a community, and a career I love.
That’s what I see in the mirror. Me, happy. Insanely happy, adorned in jewels and wearing the most amazing dress. Because while family and home and career are all vastly more important, one can never discount the value of