Gossamer Cord

“What isn’t right, Mrs. Mills?” I asked.

She looked embarrassed and shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, nothing really, Miss Violetta. I’ve had so much work to do these last days that I don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels.”

“Perhaps we could get Amy Terrett in from the village to give you a hand.”

“Amy Terrett! No thank you. I’d be telling her what to do half the time instead of getting on with it. Quicker to do it myself.”

“Well, I am sure my mother would be happy to get her if it would help.”

“Don’t you say nothing of this to her ladyship. I’m not complaining about the work. This is a wedding, and weddings only come now and then, and if I’m not capable of handling them I don’t know who is.”

“But there is something. You said it wasn’t right.”

“You was always like that, Miss Violetta, wasn’t you? Right from a baby. Wouldn’t let nothing go. Why this, why that, and on and on till you got an answer. Now, Miss Dorabella, she’s different. Unless it was something about her, of course.”

“Is this something about Dorabella?” I asked.

“It’s all one of them mountains out of molehills, you might say.” She looked at the kitchen maid and lifted her shoulders.

“You won’t rest till you get it out of me, will you? All I was saying was that Mr. Dermot Tregarland ought not to be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s the bridegroom, that’s why.”

“Well, he has to be here. We can’t have a wedding without him.”

“That’s true enough. But he should have stayed somewhere else…at a hotel or something.”

“There’s plenty of room here.”

“It ain’t right for bride and groom to sleep under the same roof on the day before their wedding. It’s unlucky.”

“Oh, Mrs. Mills, I never heard such nonsense. He’s been here before and we’ve visited his family. We were all under the same roof then. Nobody thought anything about it.”

“This is the night before the wedding.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, it’s only yesterday you were a little ’un, Miss Violetta. There you were, sitting at my table and popping raisins in your mouth when you thought I wasn’t looking. And there was Dorabella with you. There’s things you have to learn. I can only tell you it’s unlucky for bride and groom to spend the night before the wedding under the same roof.”

I laughed. “Well, they’ll be married soon and it won’t matter about their being under the same roof.”

“I didn’t say it would. I’m only telling you what I’ve always heard. But I wouldn’t like Miss Dorabella to know.”

“Don’t worry. She wouldn’t care if she did.”

“That’s a fact. She never saw anything she didn’t want to.”

There was a glass jar of raisins on the table. I leaned forward, took one, and, smiling at Mrs. Mills, I put it into my mouth.

“You’re cheeky, you are,” said Mrs. Mills.

And I went out of the kitchen and remembered later that I had not told her there was an extra person for dinner.

It was Christmas Eve. The Yule log had been brought in. In the kitchen they were baking mince pies and preparing the mulled wine for the carol singers when, they came. Hampers were being sent to the people in the cottages. Caddington always kept up the traditions and customs of the past.

My uncle Charles with his family were with us, accompanied by Grandmother Lucie. The house was full.

Grandmothers Lucie and Belinda were closeted together, talking about old times. Their lives had been very much entwined—often dramatically—and there was a certain relationship between them, rather like that which had existed with my mother and my aunt Annabelinda who had died violently and mysteriously many years before. We did not talk about that. Grandmother Belinda did not like us to, and my mother was always reticent about her, too.

Christmas was a time for stirring memories, and I suspected that when Lucie and Belinda were together there was a great deal of talk of those early days.

Edward arrived with Gretchen. They were now engaged to be married.

I often thought what a significant time that had been in Germany. There would not have been these preparations for this wedding now but for that. Edward and Gretchen? Well, he had met her before, but I could not help feeling that the incidents we had seen in the Böhmerwald had precipitated them into a binding relationship. It had certainly made Edward see that he could not leave her in Germany.

There was much merriment at the dinner table that night. We pulled crackers and produced our paper hats and read our mottoes while we laughed at the useless little articles we found in them—hearts of mock-gold and silver, keyrings, tin whistles, and so on.

My father sat at the head of the table. He was very happy. He loved to have the family around him and he, at least, I was sure, had no qualms about the coming marriage, except perhaps to hope that Dermot would become more interested in the estate which would be his…as dedicated as Gordon Lewyth was to ensure its prosperity.