“I’ve written a letter to St. Joseph’s Hospital, telling them that you’ll not be accepting their position.”
Blair took a deep breath and sat down heavily in a chair. She hadn’t thought about having to give up the internship.
Lee leaned forward on the desk. “I was thinking that maybe I’ve been a bit highhanded.” He began to study his nails. “If you want to call tomorrow off, I’d understand.”
For a moment, Blair was so bewildered she couldn’t say anything. Was he saying that he didn’t want to marry her? She stood quickly. “If you’re trying to get out of this after all you’ve done to force me to marry you, I’ll—.”
She couldn’t say any more because Leander had leaped from behind the desk, grabbed her shoulders and kissed her in a hard, intense way that left her speechless.
“I don’t want out,” he said when he had released her and Blair had managed to get her weak knees under control. “Now, get back to work, doctor. On second thought, go home and rest. If I know your sister, she has three dresses for you to try on, and your mother will have a hundred things for you to do. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.” He grinned broader. “And tomorrow night. Now, get out of here.”
Blair couldn’t help smiling back at him, and she kept smiling all the way home.
But her smile disappeared as soon as she entered the Chandler house. Mr. Gates was furious because she had been working at the hospital on a Sunday and not at home helping her sister with the wedding arrangements, especially when poor Houston wasn’t feeling well today. Blair was tired, too, and she was nervous about the wedding, and she was close to tears before the odious man got through yelling at her. Opal seemed to understand what her daughter was feeling and quickly got Mr. Gates to go to his study, as she took Blair into the garden
to start writing thank-you notes.
Blair was still smarting from Mr. Gates’s attack when she sat down with her mother.
“How could you marry a man like him, Mother? How could you subject Houston to him? At least I got away, but Houston’s had to stay here all these years.”
Opal was silent for a few minutes. “I guess I didn’t consider you girls when I fell in love with Mr. Gates.”
“Fell in love with him! But I thought that your family forced you to marry him.”
“Where in the world did you get such an idea?” Opal asked, aghast.
“I think Houston and I must have decided it on our own. We couldn’t see any other reason for your marrying him. Perhaps we liked to think that after our father died, you were too distraught to care whom you married.”
Opal gave a little laugh. “You both were so young when William died, and I’m sure that as children you’d remember him as the most wonderful of fathers, always doing things, creating things, making excitement wherever he went.”
“He wasn’t like that?” Blair asked cautiously, dreading to hear awful things about her adored father.
Opal put her hand on her daughter’s arm. “He was all and more than you remember. I’m sure you don’t remember half of his spirit, his flamboyance, or his courage or ambition. Both of you girls have inherited much from him.” She sighed. “But the truth is that I found William Chandler the most exhausting man on earth. I loved him dearly, but there were days when I had tears of relief in my eyes when he finally left the house. You see, I’d been raised in the belief that a woman’s role in life was to sit in the front parlor and direct servants while she embroidered. The most strenuous thing I had planned to undertake was counted cross-stitch. All those little squares to count!”
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.