“You might join us again in the afternoons,” Henry offered. “When you’re well enough.”
“We are to head back home.” She sniffed. “My mother does not trust these country healers. Besides”—she again turned to face me—“I am sure you much prefer your time together. After all, it’s likely limited.”
It was satisfying, then, to take Henry’s hand in my own, and squeeze it with all the strength of my healthy fingers.
Shortly after seeing Sigrid, knowing we had little time left for secrecy, Henry went to his father, and then my own. I wasn’t present for those conversations and spent that day trying to manage the twin needles of hope and anxiety that pierced my thoughts again, and again, and yet again. Hindsight makes it easy to dismiss the tension of waiting, but I will never forget those long minutes when Henry was in my father’s study with the door closed.
My father, of course, agreed. It was Henry’s family that made their dissatisfaction known. But, unlike me, Henry had a say over his future. He told his parents he would marry me, with or without their involvement. And who could imagine a life without Henry? The Tremaines, too, knew he was the best in the room.
Was it foolish that I took Henry’s insistence, his devotion, for granted? I knew nothing else. We were two cups, nestled. A hook and an eye, a latch and a clasp, as fitted and natural as a tree and its own bark.
Customarily, when a young woman was married, her family provided a trousseau: a few good dresses, chemises, petticoats, stays, soft linens for the table and bed, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs and napkins—a set large enough for whatever household she was about tooversee—and, the finest item of all, her wedding dress. I did not have sisters, or a mother, to fuss over these details. And my engagement to Henry was sudden, so I did not have time to prepare a set of napkins, or to worry over the perfumes and toiletries a new bride might have felt entitled to. But from the very first suggestion of betrothal, Agatha and I had worked on the dress.
Up to that point, every sartorial item in my life had been picked for practicality. My velvets were mockado—made with wool—to ensure their warmth. My shoes were buskins—outdoor boots—for mules and heels got lost in the sandy, boggy heath. My hems were shorter than fashionable to avoid the winter mud. Fabrics were brown, or gray, or burgundy, for they showed little dirt and required less dye. So, the choice of a blue organza, so pale it looked like the edge of the sky, so delicate it felt imbued with nobility, was momentous.
Agatha helped me with every step: the cutting of the cloth against the pattern, the measuring of the train, the pinning, the many fittings, the countless stitches, the adding of embellishments and buttons and ribbons. It was the first time we were working together, toward the same goal. She may have believed she had finally tamed me, or that her job was done. But I felt, in the adding of each stitch, in the repetition of the needle diving in and out of that blue cloth, in the pulling of the thread, that I was building a pathway to my own future.
I had already learned clothing was armor. Now I was experiencing it as a totem of mobility. And on the day of the wedding itself, it became an artifact: the dress that saw me leave my childhood home. The sleeve that wiped my tears when I said goodbye to my father. The stays that squeezed my waist in the carriage ride back to Henry’s lodge.
That first evening alone with Henry, we went to our room early. The wedding had been in the morning, followed by a very long dinner, and later a lighter supper, and hours of conversing and celebrating, and a candle dance—the dancers holding a taper, lighting one another’s wicks as they passed—that had rubbed blisters into my feet. We were departing in the morning, first thing. We were alone for the first time that day.
“That was the longest day of my life,” Henry said, falling into a chair.
“I think my feet would like to quit my body.” I looked at myself in the looking glass. Bare shoulders. Pearls woven into my hair. “And I’ve stained my dress,” I said, dismayed, fingering my sleeve.
A maid knocked. She had come to help undo my buttons. Seeing a look of fear on my face, Henry sent her away. “I’ll help you with your buttons,” he said, and came over to meet me in front of the mirror.
My heart was in my throat. Gently, he turned me, and looked down my back. “I have never seen so many buttons.” He spun me around, to face him, once more. “I’m quite serious. You are sprouting them. You have buttons from the base of your skull all the way down to the floor.”
“I know,” I told him, pulling my hair aside so he could access the silk-covered fasteners. “I sewed them on myself.”
“Why would one ever do such a thing?” He began to help me, undoing the buttons carefully, moving down my spine.
“To dispel unwanted suitors.”
We smirked at one another in the mirror. I could feel the night’s air on my neck, then my shoulders, then the small of my back. His fingers traced my spine. They were warm.
“I think, alas, we have run out of buttons,” he said, into the nape of my neck.
“Then I do not think I can stall much longer.” I tilted back to look at him. His steady, reassuring eyes. The dress slid from my shoulders, and down toward the floor.
It remained in a pile by the mirror overnight. In the morning, the maid folded it into paper, and tucked the bundle into my trunk. And we began the six-day journey in a wagon and on horseback to Henry’s family’s manor hall.
I loved Henry and I was cautious with fear. I was sore and miserable from the time in the claustrophobic wagon, and unused to riding a horse for so long—my legs were stiff and my head hurt each time the carriage went over a rut or a bump. Most of the time we had spenttogether had been in the woods, with the birds, but now we were surrounded by people and men and horses and hoofbeats and dust. In the evenings, we would stop at inns and other estates, following the well-worn path the Tremaines took each year. But to me it was all new: each house, each host, each meal. I had never traveled far, and now I was breaking bread and making conversation with all manner of people.
When we finally arrived, I was stunned by the sight of the Tremaines’ home: stone columns and baroque carvings surrounded by verdant, unending gardens. I understood, in the ensuing hours, all that I’d gained through my marriage, and why the alliance, even to a third-born, had overwhelmed my small village. There were more people working at the estate than lived in my entire hamlet: They moved about carrying straw and bales of cloth, piling firewood, leading livestock, warming themselves at small fires, herding children and animals. The hunting lodge—the pinnacle of wealth in my village—was rustic in comparison.
Henry was employed by his father. Though my husband traveled often, we were set up to reside on a small, leased country home not far from his parents. It was there that I learned, via letter, that both my father and brother had died of the same plague. My family had passed within months of my leaving while I had been dining on currants and stuffed pheasants in the Tremaines’ great hall.
Death was no stranger to me or those that I knew—it was part and parcel with being alive. (I had heard the squeal of an animal that knew it would be slaughtered. I had seen men hung in the town square. I had seen, also, people crushed to death in the rabid crowd at one of the same executions. I had heard the stories of the women—the fevers that come after birth, the bodies in the stream, the promise behind the purpled eyes.) So, it wasn’t the death, but rather the loss, that I had to make sense of. The letter said that my father’s estate had been divided to pay his debts. But it did not say what had become of my family’s belongings and I could not stop thinking about Father’s canvas-and-serge apron, the garment that had covered his chest as reliably as a secondlayer of skin. The idea that it had been burned or discarded was almost as unbearable as the loss of his life itself.
I learned: A whole world of sorrow could be delivered in the news of one letter.
For a time, I was unmoored by the loneliness of what had happened. I found myself unable to fulfill household duties, unwilling to join feasts at the Tremaines’ hall. The hours were gray. And then, I learned I was pregnant.
When I told Henry, his brown eyes went browner, bigger, wider. I felt a surge of feeling as he took my fingers in his and squeezed. The hope and fear on his face were familiar. They were the same opposing forces—push and pull, hot and cold—driving my own beating heart.
My daughters were born twelve months apart, almost to the day. If time were your only consideration, you might consider them close enough to be twins. Bathed together, raised together, hair braided together. But the girls turned out to be nothing alike.
