Page 19 of Duke of Moonstone
Lavinia reached for the letter, read it, then looked at the box which was still sitting on the table between them, its ivory ribbon half undone. “May I?”
Frances gestured at it with the resignation of someone with no opinions about their own life.
Lavinia lifted the lid and went quiet in a way that made Frances look up. Her sister’s hands had stilled on the edge of the box, and her expression had shifted to a thoughtful one.
“Come and look,” she said.
Frances came around the table, looked into the box, and then was quiet too.
Two dresses, folded between layers of tissue with extraordinary care, one ivory silk so fine it seemed too precious to touch. And the other was white with a silver thread so delicate it was almost not there at all. Both of them were simply perfect.
And extremely, unmistakably expensive.
“Good heavens,” Lavinia said.
“And he even sent two,” Frances said because she could not think of anything more useful to offer.
“He sent two so that you could choose.” Lavinia looked at her. “He did not know which you would prefer.”
“He also did not ask me when I would prefer to be married,” Frances complained. “He decided that Friday would do and wrote to inform me as though I am, as though the whole arrangement is simply a matter of logistics to be managed, and I am one of the items on the list.”
“Yes,” Lavinia said. “He is rather like Tristan in that respect.”
Frances looked at the dresses. She reached out and touched the edge of the ivory silk which was so soft it barely registered as fabric at all.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this,” she said, and she meant the dresses, but she also meant everything else entirely.
Lavinia took her hand and drew her to the small sofa by the window then sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders were touching. “You are frightened,” she observed.
“I am trying very hard to be practical,” Frances said, which was not a denial, and they both knew it. “Everyone seems to want me to be practical about it, and I am,—I am making every effort. But I did not imagine it like this, Lavinia. I thought there would be a choice. I thought I would have some say in it. And instead, I am looking at two dresses I did not select for a wedding I did not plan, and in two days, I will be married to a man who...” She stopped. “How am I supposed to find any warmth in it? I can barely tolerate him.”
Lavinia smiled.
“It is not amusing,” Frances said.
“No,” her sister agreed though the smile did not entirely disappear. “Frances, seek love in it. I know how that soundsfrom where you are standing, but seek it nonetheless. Leave room for it.”
“How can I seek love?” Frances looked at her. “You know the manner of man he is. Cold and controlled! He proposed marriage to me by listing the practical advantages, Lavinia. He might have been discussing drainage.”
“When I first met Tristan,” Lavinia argued, “he was cold. Guarded to the point of appearing entirely without feeling. I was quite certain there was nothing beneath the surface worth the trouble of finding.” She paused. “I was wrong.”
Frances looked at her sister’s face and thought about Tristan, who loved Lavinia with a steadiness and a completeness that Frances had quietly envied for two years. “That was different,” she said.
“There is always hope, Frances. That is all I am saying. There is always hope.”
Frances looked at the two dresses across the room and tried to feel hope. Instead, a sigh pushed past her lips.
She chose the ivory.
“Are you ready?” Lavinia appeared in the doorway of the small room off the vestibule where Frances had been standing for the past several minutes doing very little except breathing with great care.
“Yes,” Frances said.
This was not entirely true. She was dressed, and her hair was done, and she was holding her bouquet, small ivory roses that had arrived that morning with no accompanying note
Whether she was ready in the larger sense of the word was a question she had decided not to examine too closely until it was no longer relevant.
The church was quiet. Only a small gathering, Lavinia and Tristan, Lady Montfort—in an expression of profound self-congratulation that Frances carefully did not look at directly—and a handful of Whitestone’s acquaintances arranged on his side of the aisle.
