The Bridegroom. Linda Miller Lael

all I’m saying. A week. A month. A year?”

      Fitch practically spat his answer. “Until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “That’s how much time I’ll give her.”

      With that, Lydia’s unlikely intended disappeared behind the curtains again. Short of going back there and hauling the man out by the scruff—and then doing what?—Gideon was out of ideas.

      Except one, that is.

      And the contingency plan had to do with Lydia herself, not Jacob Fitch.

      CHAPTER THREE

      LYDIA DID NOT SLEEP A WINK that night, and little wonder, with her wedding scheduled for the very next day and the memory of Gideon’s unexpected visit to plague her thoughts.

      At the first crow of the neighbor’s rooster, Lydia arose from her bed, washed and dressed and replaited her hair, pinning the braid into a heavy knot at her nape.

      Just the way Jacob liked it. She was to wear it just so once they were married, he’d declared on more than one occasion. Modesty befitted a banker’s wife.

      Lydia stared miserably at her own reflection, pale in the mirror above her vanity table. Her eyes were hollow, the color of bruises, not violets, and her mouth pinched.

      Gideon, she thought, knowing she was torturing herself and unable to stop, would prefer her hair down, tumbling in curls to her waist.

      Behind her, the bedroom door opened.

      Helga, who never knocked, appeared in the gap, looking troubled. She’d been so sure Gideon would return—now, it seemed, reality was setting in. “Will you be coming down for breakfast?” she asked, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t wake the aunts, who shared a room across the hall from Lydia’s.

      Lydia shook her head. If she tried to swallow so much as a morsel, she would surely gag.

      Helga hesitated, then stepped into the room. Crossed to stand behind Lydia and lay a hand on her shoulder. Her gaze strayed to Nell’s wedding dress, hanging like a burial shroud from a hook on the inside of the wardrobe door, came back to Lydia’s wan face, reflected in the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to do this,” the housekeeper said awkwardly. “You mustn’t do this. Lydia, please don’t sacrifice yourself to save a lot of musty old keepsakes and dented silver—”

      “Are the aunts ‘musty old keepsakes,’ Helga?” Lydia retorted quietly. “They won’t survive without the roof and walls of this house to shelter them. It’s their entire world.”

      Helga gave a disgusted little snort, but her eyes were sad, and her mouth drooped at the corners. “They survived a war, Lydia,” she insisted. “They survived seeing their first home ransacked and then burned to the ground, losing the men they loved, traveling all the way out here to Arizona with the Judge and starting over from scratch. Their father pampered them, treated them like a pair of china figurines that would break if anyone breathed on them. Then Nell did the same, God rest her generous soul, and now you’re carrying on the tradition. Don’t you see, Lydia? No one ever gave Miss Mittie and Miss Millie a chance to show how strong they really are.”

      “They were young when all those things happened,” Lydia countered, very softly. “The war and the rest of it, I mean.” She’d tried to imagine what the raid on the plantation back in Virginia must have been like—flames everywhere, consuming all but a few portraits, some jewelry, a small sterling vase that had been a gift from George and Martha Washington, presented to a Fairmont ancestor in appreciation for flour and dried beans sent to Valley Forge during that desperate winter—but she knew such trauma was beyond imagining. Mittie had suffered severe burns, saving the letters Captain Stanhope had written her after accepting a commission in the Army of the Potomac, and Millie had nearly been raped by one of the raiders. A former slave called Old Billy had intervened, according to Nell’s rare and whispered accounts—shared with Helga, not Lydia—and died for his chivalry, shot through the throat.

      “Give them a chance,” Helga pleaded. “You’ll see what those old aunts of yours are made of, if you’ll just ask them how they’d truly feel about leaving here.”

      Lydia considered the idea, and then shook her head. Mittie and Millie were old now, too old to change. For her sake, they might try to make the best of things, but it was simply too much to ask of them, so late in life.

      Swallowing, she made herself meet Helga’s gaze, there in the mirror glass. “There’s been no word from Gideon, then?” she asked, tentatively and at considerable cost to her pride.

      “Not yet,” Helga answered solemnly, but there was a faint glint of hope in her pale blue eyes. “Not just yet.”

      “He won’t come,” Lydia said, almost whispering.

      But he had come when he’d received the letter, hadn’t he?

      And he’d kissed her.

      “I think you’re wrong about that,” Helga replied, turning, starting for the door. “I’ll bring you some coffee and a roll. You have to eat something, Lydia—whatever happens today, you’ll need your strength.”

      There was no point in arguing. Helga would do what Helga would do.

      And Lydia would do what Lydia would do: pour the coffee out the window, and leave the roll on the sill for the birds. Because unless a miracle happened, and Lydia had never personally encountered one of those, she would be Jacob’s wife in a few hours—with all the attendant responsibilities, including the conjugal ones.

      With that prospect ahead of her, food was out of the question.

      “Thank you,” she murmured. “But I’d rather come down to the kitchen to eat, like everyone else.”

      Helga nodded, resigned, and remained her usual salty self. “Just don’t go getting the idea I’m going to be waiting on you hand and foot like some servant,” the other woman warned, “because I’m not.”

      Lydia laughed, in spite of all she would have to endure in the coming hours, days, months and years. Helga kept that huge house clean, and prepared three meals a day, but she didn’t wait on anybody unless they were about to be buried—or married.

      When Helga had gone, Lydia forced some starch into her spine, sat up straight, and regarded her image directly.

      “You have got to marry Jacob Fitch,” she told herself, “whether you want to or not. So stop whining about it and carry on.”

      The short lecture strengthened Lydia; she rose from her seat in front of the vanity table, made up her bed as neatly as she would have done on any ordinary day, and approached Aunt Nell’s wedding dress, where it hung on her wardrobe door. Although yellowed in places, with brownish crinkles where it had been folded for so many years—said crinkles had thwarted even Helga’s efforts to press them away with an iron heated on the kitchen stove—the gown was still a confection of silk, hand-knotted German lace, seed pearls mellowed by age, and faded but intricately woven ivory ribbon in the bodice.

      Regarding that remarkable dress, Lydia couldn’t help thinking about how different things had been the last time a bride donned it. Nell Fairmont had been even younger than Lydia was now—only sixteen—when she’d married Mr. Baker, a newspaper man twice her age, in a church ceremony with all the trimmings—flowers, a cake, an emerald-studded band for her finger. And on that sunlit day, so long ago, Nell had walked down the aisle on the Judge’s arm, wearing this very dress.

      Nell had been a mere babe-in-arms, her one sibling, Lydia’s father, barely a year old, when the Judge had fled Virginia with his daughters and two orphaned grandchildren. Nell and Herbert’s mother, Louisa, had died only a few months after the war began; it was said she simply hadn’t been able to bear being separated from her husband, Andrew Fairmont, gone for a soldier. Andrew, Mittie and Millie’s younger brother, had been wounded early on, spent months in a Union hospital, and finally, after an exchange of prisoners, made his slow and painful way home, only to be told that Louisa had