Chapter 6
Six
The shop wall was a rainbow of coloured ribbons and trims, reel after reel of velvet, satin, lace, and sparkling silver-and-gold lamé. Despite it being her eighth season in London, this was Madelaine’s first visit to Harding she’d cried like she had the day the letter came.
But…the next week, she wore the dress again.
She wore it to church and let her father’s sermon wash over her.
She’d looked up at the distant beams and the hazy, glass-filtered light.
She’d imagined she was at the bottom of the ocean, looking up, and the words and the light and the grace of God were the currents that washed and cleansed her…
It hadn’t helped. Nothing did. That was what she learnt, as year after year passed and she kept wearing the dress, the blue fabric fading with every wash.
Time kept on passing and things kept on fading, and new memories and concerns built up like a shingle wall between your old life and your new but… nothing helped.
Alfred stayed dead.
The rose-gold wedding dress duly admired, her aunt bustled off to look at muslins. Madelaine trailed after her, giving desultory strokes to stacked rolls of velvets and poplins, silks and serges, twills and wools.
“I’d forgotten how much fun this could be,” her aunt said as they left the warehouse, her orders duly given.
They headed back along the street to where they’d agreed to meet the coachman, half an hour late already, but her aunt couldn’t walk any faster.
The coachman, in her aunt’s employ since her marriage, was long used to waiting.
“I do hope you haven’t stretched yourself, Aunt. There hardly seems any need, not when Lord Cotereigh is being so…generous.” How uncomfortable, being indebted to a man she reviled.
“Nonsense. Not at all. I’ve had little sums tucked away here and there for a long time, just waiting to be needed. It gives me great joy to spend it on you.”
“But is any of this needed? The list of things he wants us to order! It all seems so absurd. I begin to think Lord Cotereigh likes to spend money just for the sake of it. What a waste on a mere game. Think how much good the sum could do if spent on those who really needed it.”
“I doubt he sees it as any sum at all. Men of his rank lose ten times the amount in one sitting at the gaming tables.”
Madelaine only pursed her lips. She couldn’t imagine Lord Cotereigh ever standing up at the end of the night and being the loser.
“When my dear Charles was alive,” said her aunt, speaking of her late husband, “I used to be out in fashionable society much more than I ever am now, so I do know what men of his rank can be. We were young…life was fun. And unwise and giddy—and I was the giddiest of them all. Me, a country parson’s daughter, suddenly wedded to an earl?
Oh, I was giddy and unwise, all right. London didn’t know what to make of me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. What dear Charles ever saw in me…”
Madelaine squeezed her aunt’s arm against her side. “Your beauty, dearest aunt—both inside and out. And it was the inner that won him—your dear, dear goodness of heart. My uncle was the most sensible of all men to see it, and revere it, as it so deserved to be revered.”
Her aunt sniffed. “Oh, stop it. You’re going to make me cry.
And don’t I look ridiculous enough already, without adding that to my crimes!
Beauty… I don’t know where that ever went.
Or not mine. It was a girlish thing, not lasting.
The bloom on a rose. But you…” She squeezed Madelaine’s arm back.
“You’ll be beautiful when you’re grey and old… ”