She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Then I met your father. For some reason, he decided he wanted me, and I don’t really think I had much say in it. He came into my life with his extraordinary handsomeness, and I don’t think I ever even considered saying no to him.
“But then we were married, and there was one crisis after another to handle, all of them caused by Bill’s lust for life. Even when William produced children, he made twins; one child wasn’t enough for him.”
She looked down at her hands, and there were tears in her eyes. “I thought I’d die, too, after Bill passed away. I didn’t seem to have a reason for living, but then I began to remember things that I had once enjoyed, such as needlework, and of course I had you girls. Then Mr. Gates came along. He was as different as night and day from Bill, and he liked what Bill used to call my ‘busywork.’ Mr. Gates had rigid ideas of what a woman should and should not do. He didn’t expect me to spend Sunday afternoons climbing mountains with him as Bill used to. No, Mr. Gates wanted to provide a lovely home for me, and I was to stay in that home and tend to my children and give tea parties in the afternoons. As I got to know the man more, I found that he was easy to please, and that the things that came naturally to me quite often were the ones that he expected from me. With your father, I was never quite sure what I was supposed to do.”
She looked up at Blair. “So I found I was in love with him. What I wanted to do and his ideas of what I should do matched perfectly. I’m afraid that I didn’t really think of you girls, or realize how much like Bill both of you were. I knew you were like your father, and so I arranged for you to live with Henry, but I thought Houston was like me, and she is to some extent. But Houston is also like her father, and it comes out in odd ways, such as her dressing as an old woman and going into the mine camps. Bill would have done something like that.”
Blair was silent for a long time as she thought about what her mother had said, and she wondered if she could ever love Leander. She’d known for sure that she was in love with Alan, but she hadn’t been exactly devastated when he’d jilted her. There was too much bound up in what had happened. She couldn’t look at Lee without remembering that her sister had loved him so much and for so long, and now Houston was going to have to watch him marry someone else.
Blair didn’t sleep much the night before the wedding, and it seemed that all the demons of the night were still there in the morning. The bright sunlight of the day couldn’t rid her of her sense of doom.
For the last few days, she’d managed to forget for whole minutes that she was marrying her sister’s intended, but then she’d always believed that it would never actually happen. She had thought that somehow she’d get out of marrying Leander, and Houston could have him back.
At ten o’clock, they left for Taggert’s house, where the wedding was being held, Opal and the twins riding in Houston’s pretty little carriage, one of the many gifts from Taggert, the stableboy behind, driving a big wagon that Houston had borrowed, the wedding dresses hidden inside muslin in the back. They were silent all the way to the house. When Blair asked Houston what she was thinking, Houston said she hoped that the lilies had arrived undamaged.
Blair knew that this was further proof that her sister’s major interest in the man she was marrying was his monetary worth.
And once Blair saw Taggert’s house, she was sure that Houston had sold herself to the god of money.
The house looked as if it were carved out of a mountain of marble: cool and white and vast. The downstairs was dominated by a big, sweeping, double staircase that curved up two sides of a hallway that was bigger than that in any house Blair’d ever seen.
“We’ll come down there,” Houston said, pointing toward the stairs. “One of us on each side.” Surrounded by a bevy of prettily dressed girlfriends, she sauntered away and started an inspection of the house, while Blair stood where she was.
“It takes a while to get used to,” Opal whispered to her daughter. There was a feeling about the place that it wasn’t real, that it was out of a fairy tale and that it would disappear as quickly as it had appeared.
“Houston plans to live in this?” Blair whispered back.
“It does seem smaller when Kane is here,” Opal assured her. “I think we should go upstairs now. There’s no telling what Houston has planned for us.”
Blair followed her mother up the wide stairs, looking over her shoulder all the time to the floor below. Everywhere she looked, she saw exotic arrangements of flowers and greenery, and on the landing she paused to look out the window to the grounds below. They were beautiful, with a lush lawn and shrubberies.
Opal paused beside her. “That’s the service yard. You should see the garden.”
Blair didn’t say any more as she followed her mother up to the second floor and the private family rooms.
“Houston’s put you in here,” Opal said, opening the door to a tall-ceilinged room with a white marble fireplace that was carved with swags and flowers. The couches, chairs, and tables in the room should have been in museums.
“This is the sitting room and through here is the bedroom and that’s the bath. Each guest room has a sitting room and a bath all its own.”
Blair ran her hand along the marble basin in the bathroom and, although she’d never seen any before and couldn’t be sure, she thought the fixtures might be gold. “Brass?” she asked her mother.
“He wouldn’t have it in his house,” Opal said with some pride. “Now, I must go and see if Houston needs any help. You have hours before you need to be ready, so why don’t you take a nap?”
Blair started to protest that she couldn’t possibly sleep, but then she looked at the enormous marble tub and thought that she’d like to make use of it.
As soon as she was alone, she filled the tub with steamy hot water and climbed into it, the water relaxing her instantly. She stayed in there a long time, until her skin began to wrinkle, and then stepped out and dried with a towel so thick it could have been a pillow. She wrapped herself in a pink cashmere robe and went into the bedroom, where she promptly fell asleep on the big, soft bed.
When she woke, she felt rested and clear-headed, and she remembered her mother’s words of there being a garden in the back of the house. Quickly, she dressed in her usual simple skirt and blouse and left the room. Not wanting to use the main staircase, since she could hear muffled voices below, she went down a corridor past closed doors and eventually found a back staircase that led into a maze of kitchen and storage rooms on the first floor. Every inch of these rooms was filled with people scurrying back and forth and creating wonderful smells of food. Blair had a difficult time getting through the crowd. Several people saw her, but no one had time to comment on a bride being in the kitchen two hours before the wedding began. Blair was only concerned that Houston didn’t see her. No doubt Houston had a timetable and she would keep to it no matter what happened. Houston would never find time to slip away into the garden.
Behind the house was a lawn that was now covered with enormous tents, and tables with pink linen tablecloths, and hundreds of vases of flowers. Men and women in uniforms were hurrying in and out of the house to put food and condiments on the tables.
Blair hurried past these people, too, and went to what looked to be the garden below. When she first stepped into the edge of the garden, she was unprepared for what she saw. Before her rolled acres of winding paths, appearing and disappearing amid plants such as she’d never seen before. Tentatively, she began to follow a path.
The commotion of the wedding preparations disappeared behind her and, for the first time in days, she felt free to think.
This was her wedding day, but right now she couldn’t remember how she had got here. Three weeks ago, she was in Pennsylvania and she had her entire future mapped out. But how different everything had turned out! Alan had run away rather than marry her. Her sister had lost the man she loved and was now marrying one of the richest men in the country —without any love invol
ved.
And everything was Blair’s fault. She had come home to see her sister married and had instead managed to make her into a mercenary. Houston might as well have put herself on the auction block and taken the highest bidder.
As Blair strolled about the garden, frowning over her thoughts, she saw Taggert coming down the path. Before she thought about what she was doing, she turned abruptly and went the other way before he saw her. She’d gone no more than a few feet when she saw an extraordinarily tall woman, who looked vaguely familiar, hurrying along the same path as Taggert. Blair couldn’t remember where she’d seen her before.
She shrugged her shoulders, dismissing the woman, and kept walking.
Her thoughts were fully occupied with what was going to happen today, and she was trying to puzzle out exactly how it had come about, when she suddenly remembered who the tall woman was.
“That’s Pamela Fenton,” she said aloud. Houston and Blair had been at the Fenton house often when they were children, to ride Marc’s ponies or to attend one of his numerous parties, and his older sister Pam had been nearly grown then and they had been in awe of her. Then she’d left home suddenly, and there had been whispers about what had happened for years afterward.
So she’s come back after all these years, and she’ll be at the wedding, Blair thought with some pleasure. Idly, she wondered what Pamela had done so long ago to cause the town to gossip about her. There was something about a stableboy, wasn’t there?
Blair stopped where she was. The scandal had indeed been about a stableboy in her father’s stables. She’d fallen in love with him, and her father had sent her away as a result of that love affair.
And Kane Taggert was that stableboy!
Grabbing her skirts, Blair ran along the path toward where both Taggert and Pam had gone. She was several feet away when she halted.
She watched in disbelief as Kane Taggert took Pamela Fenton’s face in his hands and kissed her with a great deal of passion.
With quick, hot tears in her eyes, Blair fled down the paths toward the house. What had she done to her sister? Houston was going to marry this monstrous man who kissed a woman two hours before he was to marry another.
And it was because of Blair that this was happening.
Chapter 17
Anne Seabury helped Blair into the elaborate wedding dress that Houston had designed. It was an elegantly simple dress of ivory satin, high necked, big sleeved, and as tight as the steel-ribbed corset could make it. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tiny seed pearls were sewn about the waist and at the cuffs. And the veil was of handmade lace such as Blair had never seen before.
As she glanced in the mirror, she wished that she was donning this dress under happier circumstances, that she was going to go down that aisle with a smile on her face.
But she knew that was impossible, since she’d already done what she knew she had to do. As soon as she’d seen that monster Taggert kissing another woman, she had returned to the house and sent the man a note. She had told him that she’d be wearing red roses in her hair, and she instructed the maid to tell him that he was to be sure and stand on the left, not the right as was originally planned.
Blair wasn’t sure of the legality of what she was doing, since the licenses gave the proper names of which twin was to marry which man, but perhaps she could buy her sister a little time if the minister pronounced Leander and Houston man and wife instead of marrying her to that lecherous man Taggert. She didn’t like to think of the consequences if the marriage was legal and she found herself married to Taggert.
She sent pink roses to her sister and asked her to please wear them.
At the head of the stairs, Blair grabbed her sister to her. “I love you more than you know,” she whispered before starting the descent, then, with a sigh, said, “Let’s get this spectacle over.” With every step, Blair felt that she was moving closer to her execution. What if the marriage was legal and she found herself married to that dreadful man and had to live in this mausoleum of a house?
Inside the enormous room that was supposed to be a library, but could have been an indoor baseball field, she saw Taggert next to Leander on a platform that was draped, hung, and piled with roses and greenery.
Blair kept her head high and her eyes straight. She knew that, by now, Houston must have seen what was going on, that she was, after all, going to get to marry the man she loved.
Blair looked ahead at Kane Taggert, and as she walked down the aisle toward him, she saw his brows draw together in a straight line. He knows! she thought. He knows that I’m not Houston.
For a moment, Blair was amazed at this. Right now, she doubted if even her own mother could tell which twin was which, but somehow, this man knew. She glanced at Leander and saw that he was giving Houston a slight smile, a smile of welcome. Of course, Leander was trusting, she thought; he had no reason to suspect anyone of any bad deed since he was incapable of doing anything bad himself. But Taggert, on the other hand, was reputed to have done many bad things to get his money, so he’d be looking for treachery and could therefore tell the twins apart, Blair reasoned.
Blair didn’t look at her sister as they took their places on the platform. Leander took Houston’s hand in his, while Taggert turned away from both twins and the minister.
“Dearly beloved, we—,” the minister began, but Houston cut him off.
“Excuse me, I’m Houston.”
Blair looked at her sister in astonishment. Why was Houston ruining what had been so carefully arranged?
Leander gave Blair a hard look. “Shall we exchange places?” he said to Taggert.
Taggert merely shrugged his big shoulders. “Don’t matter much to me.”
“It matters to me,” Leander said and moved to trade places with Taggert.
Lee took Blair’s hand in his and nearly squeezed it off—but she felt little pain. Taggert had publicly admitted that Houston didn’t matter to him, that he didn’t care whether he married her or someone else. Blair had never asked herself why Taggert wanted to marry Houston, and now she wondered if it was because she was the only one who’d have him.
Leander pinched her and she looked up in time to say, “I do.”
Before she was aware of what was happening, the ceremony was over, Leander was grabbing her in his arms and preparing to kiss her. To the audience, it must have looked like a kiss of great enthusiasm, but in truth, Lee whispered in her ear with a great deal of vehemence. “I want to see you outside. Now!”
Tripping over the twelve-foot train of her heavy satin dress, Blair tried to keep up with him as he half dragged her down the aisle. People descended on them as soon as they were in the hall, but Leander didn’t let go of her hand as he pulled her into a large, panelled room at the end of the corridor.
“Just what was that all about?” Leander began, but didn’t let her answer. “Do you hate the idea of living with me so badly that you’d go to such lengths to get out of it? Would you rather have a man you don’t even know than me? Anyone but me, is that it?”
“No,” she began, “I didn’t even think about you. I just thought about Houston. I didn’t want her to feel that she had to marry that awful man.”
Leander looked at her for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet. “Do you mean that you were willing to marry a man you dislike just so your sister could have the man you think she wants?”
“Of course.” Blair was a bit bewildered by his question. “What other reason would I have for making the switch?”
“Only that you thought that marriage to anyone would be preferable to marriage to me.” He grabbed her arm. “Blair, you’re going to settle this right now. You and Houston are going to talk to one another, and I want you to ask her why she wanted to marry Taggert—and I want you to listen to her answer. You understand me? I want you to really listen to her answer.”
Ignoring the hundreds of people around them, all of whom were whispering and laughing about the mix-up at the altar, Leand
er pulled Blair through the crowd as he asked where Houston was. She wasn’t difficult to find, as she sat alone in a small room that was Uttered with papers.
“I think you two have a few things that need to be said to one another,” Leander said through his teeth to Blair as he half pushed her into the room and closed the door behind her.
Alone, the twins didn’t speak to each other. Houston just sat in a chair, her head down, while Blair hovered near the door.
“I guess we should get out there and cut the cake,” Blair said tentatively. “You and Taggert—.”
Houston came out of her chair looking as if she had suddenly been turned into a harpy. “You can’t even call him by his name, can you?” she said, anger in every word. “You think he has no feelings; you’ve dismissed him and therefore you think you have a right to do whatever you want to him.”
Surprised, Blair stepped back from her sister’s anger. “Houston, what I did, I did for you. I want to see you happy.”
Houston’s fists were clenched at her sides and she advanced on Blair as if she meant to challenge her to a fight. “Happy? How can I be happy when I don’t even know where my husband is? Thanks to you, I may never know the meaning of happiness.”
“Me? What have I done except try everything in my power to help you? I’ve tried to help you come to your senses and see that you didn’t have to marry that man for his money. Kane Taggert—.”
“You really don’t know, do you?” Houston interrupted her. “You have humiliated a proud, sensitive man in front of hundreds of people, and you aren’t even aware of what you’ve done.”
“I assume you’re talking about what happened at the altar? I did it for you, Houston. I know you love Leander and I was willing to take Taggert just to make you happy. I’m so sorry about what I’ve done to you. I never meant to make you so unhappy. I know I’ve ruined your life, but I did try to repair what I’d done.”
“Me, me, me. That’s all you can say. You’ve ruined my life and all you can talk about is yourself. You know I love Leander. You know what an awful man Kane is. For the last week or so, you’ve spent every waking moment with Leander, and the way you talk about him is as if he were a god. Every other word you say is, ‘Leander.’ I think you did mean well this morning: you wanted to give me the best man.”