Page 6 of The Dravenhearst Brides

Margaret,

See you at the altar.

I hope you like the flowers.

Yours,

Merrick Dravenhearst

In the years leading to 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 overcoming her 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.

But whose life 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 pressed trimmings 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 something more.

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 certainly felt like 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.

Margaret lowered her lashes, abashed.

It was her turn. She lifted her eyes, dropped them again, unable to pour herself into him as he had into her. She whispered her vows to the marbled floor and hoped he would forgive her cowardice.

She felt vaguely sweaty, heart hammering when she finally finished. Then came a whiff of the old familiar fear, the phantom spirit of a flush rising on her neck. The anxiety was always there, lurking in the wings. Was she growing dizzy, her vision tunneling?

Mary, Mother of God, she prayed to a statue of the Holy Mother in the corner, just over her groom’s shoulder, give me strength.

The preacher’s drone buzzed remotely in her ears. Her breast continued to heave, the flush on her neck rising, becoming fully realized. She feared she might…

The world snapped into crystal clear focus when he touched her. Dravenhearst’s fingers lifted her chin, curled around her jaw and cheek, almost gentle save for the rough-hewn texture of his calloused skin. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

When she met his eyes, her mind errantly skittered to what would undoubtedly happen later this evening.

The feel of these workworn fingers on her bare limbs.

Her mouth dried at the thought. She knew little of the mechanics—for all the pontificating about her wedding day, her mother had stayed quite mum on that matter.

Margaret had never even been kissed, how on earth was she supposed to—

His lips were approaching.

Her mind short-circuited, bursting like fiery hot filaments inside a worn-out Edison bulb.

His hand was still on her cheek. She felt the barest pressure and yielded, letting him turn her head to the side, just so.

His lips landed somewhere near the corner of her mouth, half on her cheek.

It was over quickly, featherlight and horrifically proper.

He pulled away in a hurry and dropped his hand.

Margaret’s lips parted in surprise as something akin to—dare she admit it?—disappointment rushed in. She wasn’t sure that abysmal happenstance even counted as a real kiss.

Mind scrambling to catch up with her legs, Margaret was paraded through the church on Dravenhearst’s arm. Her husband was stiff, as stoic as a pallbearer in a funeral march.

Just before the church doors opened, just before she was blinded by the bright light of the Kentucky summer, she was assaulted by a vision—her white silk wedding gown turning black, dripping in ebony rivulets until she was shadow-clad from head to toe.

Over her head bloomed a weeping veil, heavy with black lace spun from a spider’s web.

She was, in that final moment within the chapel walls, not a bride, but a woman marked for mourning. For death.

According to her mother, Margaret’s wedding day should herald a new dawn, a new beginning…

“Mrs. Dravenhearst,” her husband drawled, gesturing to the open-top roadster waiting on the street. The corner of his lip turned upward in a shifty half-grin. “Shall we?”

Margaret hesitated, grounding her runaway mind with facts.

Her gown was white, not black.

The veil bridal, not weeping.

Her name was Dravenhearst, no longer Greenbrier.

And so Margaret was the same, but also, somehow, irreparably different.

Mrs. Merrick Dravenhearst.

Her mother was right, this felt like a beginning. The beginning of the end.