The True Love Wedding Dress (2 page)

Oh, how it rankled to say those words when she knew the first maid to possess the gown would be the selfish Bertrade. Aileanna swallowed back a rush of jealous resentment and forced herself to continue.

“Instead let her find the man of her dreams and live a life as fine as these seams, laughing and dancing, safe in his arms.” Aileanna let her eyes fall closed again and smiled slightly, imagining all the young lasses in future whose lives would be transformed by the simple wearing of this gown. “O’er the mountains and across the sea, no distance too great for this dress shall be. With time, the lace shall weather well, the fabric itself a magical spell.

“Down through the years, through many hands it shall pass, moving about from lass to lass. There one moment, and gone the next, let this dress drift like a tendril of smoke, fulfilling its destiny as I have bespoke.”

After falling silent, Aileanna remained motionless, her eyes still tightly closed. Ah, but it felt marvelous to use her powers again. She could have sworn she felt a tingle of warmth moving up her arms and through her body.

With a start, she realized that the tingle was real. She gasped and jerked her hands away from the dress, staring in baffled confusion at the silk and lace. Before she could collect her thoughts, a door to the kitchen banged open. Aileanna whirled to see Halford standing in the doorway, his blond hair gleaming in the firelight, his eyes as hot and blue as the base of a flame.

“We must talk, Aileanna,” he said tautly.

“Howe’er did ye gain entrance? ’Tis the middle of the night.”

“I bribed a servant to leave a door unlocked.” He waved a hand. “How I got in isn’t important. I knew you’d be working late on that dratted wedding dress, and I need to talk with you. I can’t go on like this, always passing you by in the great hall as if you’re invisible, pretending all the while to love another when it’s you and only you who possesses my heart.”

Aileanna gulped. “But, Halford, what of Bertrade? Ye’ve publicly announced yer betrothal to her. If ye back out now, there’ll be a monstrous scandal!”

“I cannot marry Bertrade. Have you no eyes in your head? She’s a bratty little witch. Nothing pleases her.”

Aileanna’s eyes went wide, for it was she, not Bertrade, who was a witch. She threw an appalled glance at the wedding dress, wondering if the spell she’d just cast upon it was responsible for Halford’s sudden avowal of love. Had she misspoken during the incantation and gotten part of it wrong? It had been a long while since she’d practiced her craft. Mayhap her skills were a wee bit rusty.

“This cannot be,” she cried, and began wringing her hands. “Ye’re not thinking clearly, Halford.”

“Please,” he whispered. “I know it may be difficult for us.”

“Difficult? Impossible, more like.”

He shook his head. “Even if my father disinherits me, which he most assuredly will, I won’t be entirely penniless. I have a trust from my grandmother, a paltry sum by most standards, but if we’re frugal, the monthly stipend will be enough to keep us in tea and biscuits with a roof over our heads. I love you, Aileanna. I have for months, perhaps from the first instant I saw you.”

“It’s the dress,” she tried to explain.

A heated gleam slipped into Halford’s blue eyes, and he walked determinedly toward her. “It’s not that awful dress you’re wearing, I assure you. Marry me, Aileanna. Say you will be my wife. I know you return my love. I’ve seen it in your eyes. We won’t be rich, but I swear, I’ll garb you in fine wool, not rags, and you’ll never have to pander to someone like Bertrade again. We can leave this godforsaken place and start over somewhere else, perhaps in America, as so many others are doing.”

Aileanna’s last thought just before Halford gathered her into his strong arms and kissed her was that this couldn’t be happening. Then every bit of common sense she possessed seemed to abandon her.
Halford.
Oh, how she loved him. The kiss was everything she’d dreamed it might be and more.

When Halford finally let her breathe again, she angled her head to glance over her shoulder. To her amazement, the dress no longer lay on the work surface behind her. She wriggled from Halford’s arms to peer under the table, thinking the gown might have slipped to the floor.

“Where has it gotten off to?” she muttered. “The wedding dress! ’Twas right here, and now it’s gone.”

Halford tried to reclaim her lips for another kiss. “Who cares where the blasted dress is?”

Aileanna cared, for it appeared to her that the gown had vanished into thin air—like a tendril of smoke.

 

 

T
he wedding gown was still the prettiest thing Katie Cole had ever seen or owned. She had thought so the first time she’d unwrapped the ivory silk and lace, of unusual style and exquisite workmanship, when it was delivered by mistake from her dressmaker. The modiste had claimed it was no design of hers, so Katie had set it aside, with regrets, to wait for the magnificent gown’s rightful owner. Then the dressmaker’s shop had burned down, along with Katie’s trousseau and her own pink satin gown. With so little time before her wedding, the ivory silk would have to do.

Katie remembered feeling like a princess when she held it up to herself, the luckiest, most beautiful bride in all of creation. Even now, as she knelt in the dust of the low-ceilinged attic to pull the dress from the bottom of an old trunk, she could feel the same tingle she’d felt before her marriage—the hope, the joy, the certainty that her future would be filled with happiness. How could it not be, when the mysterious gown had arrived so auspiciously and seemed to be a perfect fit?

Unfortunately, Katie never wore the gown.

Her betrothed was killed in a coaching mishap mere days before the wedding. Her mother said she was better off without the drunken, devil-may-care lout. Her father said that fortune-hunting Frederick had been driving his racing phaeton in the wrong direction, away from London and the church, as fast as his horses would go, once he discovered that Katie’s dowry was to be held in trust. Her aunt said it served Katie right for stubbornly insisting on marrying a man her family had only reluctantly approved. Her grandmother said she was too young, anyway, at seventeen, to know her own mind. Katie’s old nanny said Katie was pregnant.

Papa had sent her away to Devon. He’d have sent her to Hades if he could, but her mother had insisted. Katie had a new name—heaven forbid she’d ever mention the Bainbridge one again—a wedding band, and a meager allowance, if she stayed gone.

Katie, Mrs. Katherine Cole, as she had been known for the last eighteen years, wondered again what other choice she might have made. Give up her baby? Throw herself into the Thames? Beg in the streets? No. Her little cottage was comfortable, her neighbors kind to the widow of a heroic officer in the Navy, her precious daughter the light of her life. She could afford food and firewood, a small staff, and lessons for Susannah as she grew. She could not afford elegant gowns such as the one she carefully unwrapped from its tissue.

Katie touched the covered buttons down the front of the dress, marveling again at the workmanship, and at her own stupidity in believing Feckless Frederick and his words of love. Just touching the gown, though, still made her feel that True Love truly existed and that a happily-ever-after was possible—for her little girl.

Susannah was all grown up, a sweet young lady of comely looks and genteel manners, and the same stubborn pride as her mother. Katie wished the girl would wait to marry—Katie was not ready to part with her darling, who was a curly-haired infant just yesterday, it seemed—but she knew Susannah would not wait. Katie had not, after all. So Mrs. Cole was planning the wedding, and Susannah would wear the beautiful gown.

Unfortunately, Susannah hated it.

“I am not going to wear that musty old thing, and that is final!” Susannah stamped her foot, on the trailing hem of the gown Katie held out in her daughter’s bedchamber. Perhaps her darling was not quite the sweet little moppet Katie remembered. Her blue eyes were flashing, and her rosebud mouth was puckered.

“But it is a beautiful gown and—”

“It is old and dingy and out of style. The skirt is too full, the waist is too low. Whoever heard of buttons like that? I will look a fright.”

To Katie’s eyes the gown looked perfect, surprisingly not the least bit faded or yellowed with time. As for the style, she told her daughter, “Mrs. Peebles in the village can make alterations. Come, try it on and you shall see how becoming it is.”

Susannah was becoming more adamant. “What, after spiders have been living in it for decades, if not mice?”

Katie gave the gown a good shake. “See? No spiders, no mice. Just slip it on and you’ll change your mind. The gown will make you feel more beautiful than ever. Mr. Wellforde will think he is the most fortunate man in England, which he is, of course.”

“Dear Gerald already thinks he is the luckiest man in the universe, because we are to wed. He will not be happy to see me wearing my mother’s dowdy castoff.”

“We can say it is an heirloom, passed down through the family.”

“What, I should lie to dear Gerald? Or his family?”

Dear Gerald’s family—his large, London-bred, sophisticated family—was the reason Katie had unearthed the gown. “You know we discussed this, Susannah. With all the guests we had to invite to the wedding breakfast, having to rent the entire Brookville Inn and extra servants, we cannot afford much more. You still need a new traveling costume, a new riding habit, and a new night rail.” Heaven knew Katie could not send her little girl off on her honeymoon in faded flannel bedgowns, or with darned stockings and paper-thin soles on her slippers. She had been saving a portion of her meager income for Susannah’s dowry since the day the precious blue-eyed baby was born, so not much money was ever left for extravagances. “We simply cannot afford that expensive blue velvet you wanted, not even if we try to sew it ourselves, which would never look elegant enough.”

Katie had written to her mother, through Nanny, as usual. Twice a year unsigned notes had arrived, at Christmas and Katie’s birthday, with a pound note tucked between the folds, and she had written her thanks to the old nursemaid, knowing the message would reach Lady Bainbridge. Katie recently wrote of the wedding and her additional expenses, but without much hope. Her father was a despot, and a cheeseparing miser besides. Now there was no time to wait on her mother’s courage or her thin purse.

“If we should have a few pence left over,” she said, “we really should re-cover the chairs in the parlor. You would not wish us to appear as paupers in front of your new in-laws, would you?” The paltry size of that hard-gathered dowry was bad enough.

“Of course not. According to dear Gerald, the Wellfordes are very refined people.”

“Precisely. But we did have to make repairs to the roof last winter and have the pianoforte refurbished after the leak so I could keep giving music lessons. If you postpone the wedding until the beginning of the new year, when the annuity is deposited, then perhaps we can afford such luxuries. I could sell some strawberry preserves, or advertise for more students. In the spring we would have piglets to sell.”

Susannah’s pointed chin, so like her mother’s, came up. “No, I know what you are trying to do. You want to make me feel guilty so I will delay the wedding. I know you have made sacrifices for me, and I am grateful.”

“I never meant to imply anything of the sort. You know that I would give everything I had to make you happy, darling. And Mr. Wellforde will understand.”

“He will understand that I am a weak child who does not know her own mind. He will go off to his new estate and forget all about me.” Her lower lip started to tremble.

“Never, darling. He will wait the few months if he truly—”

“He does love me, I know it!” Susannah said with a wail. “But you still think I am too young to get married, too young to make such an important decision.”

Since that was part of the truth, the honest though regrettable lack of funds being the other part, Katie could not answer. She just kept running her fingers down the lace of the gown’s sleeves, feeling a warmth, a tingle, a sense that she was right. Susannah had to wear this dress; then everything would be fine.

Mr. Wellforde was an earnest, pleasant young man, Katie told herself, again, who swore he would take good care of Susannah. He had a bit of property in Hampshire he was going to turn into a horse-racing stud farm now that he was down from university, with a modest inheritance that his trustees would release to him on his marriage. The young couple would be comfortable, and perhaps able to afford trips to London where his family lived and, Katie prayed, visits home. They seemed compatible enough, both enjoying simple country pursuits. Why, they had met when he was on a walking tour through Brookville with some classmates and Susannah had given them directions. And they both liked horses. Which was, perhaps, more than Katie and Frederick had had in common. Mr. Wellforde was not half as handsome as Frederick had been, or as well spoken, but Susannah seemed to think dear Gerald was as good-looking as Adonis and as smart as Aristotle. The boy seemed just as besotted. Bacon-brained, both of them.