Daring Bride

by Jane Peart

  In the kitchen Cara busied herself making coffee, keeping up a lively monologue about Luc and Niki. She was curious about the book Kitty was writing, but instinctively felt it might be better to avoid the subject. She certainly didn’t want to bring up a topic that would cause another eruption. It was like tiptoeing around the brink of a smoldering volcano. Kitty’s expression did not invite intimate confidences or an easy exchange of ideas.

  Cara scrounged in one of the cabinets for something to serve and found an open box of cookies. Her back was turned when Kitty asked, “How is Kip, and what is he up to these days?”

  Cara poured their coffee with an unsteady hand. Should she tell Kitty right away that Kip had applied for active status in the military, or should she let him tell her? Better to be the target of her sister’s outburst herself than to have Kip bear the brunt of Kitty’s hostility. Cara didn’t want him to be upset as well.

  She brought their cups from the counter, then looked warily at her sister, took a deep breath, and said, “Kitty, Kip’s going back into the service as an instructor. There are so few men with the knowledge and skill the government needs—”

  Kitty set down the cup she had just lifted to her lips, so hard that the coffee splashed into the saucer. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I might have known it!” Her eyes flashed. “The peak experience of Kip’s life was the war! He couldn’t ever settle down after all the excitement was over, could he?”

  “The army needs pilots, Kitty. We just have to be prepared, that’s all. In case there’s another war. We may be drawn in—”

  “Of course we will.” Kitty’s voice shook. “If warmongers and men eager to flaunt their manhood have anything to do with it!”

  Kitty’s heels clicked on the linoleum floor as she marched to the back door and yanked it open. She let it slam behind her. From the kitchen window, Cara watched her sister walk back to her car and get in. In a few minutes the car disappeared down the drive toward Eden Cottage.

  Cara would have given anything if this had not happened. But maybe it had to. Maybe there was nothing she could have done to prevent it. Maybe the chasm between them was already too deep and wide.

  Kitty was on a mission. Kitty was as much a casualty of war as Richard had been. What she had been through—the sorrow, the loss—had strengthened her, but it had also hardened her. She was passionately committed to keeping the flame of her obsessive pacifism alive in the memory of Richard’s life and death. Nothing else was as important. And anyone who didn’t share her views was the enemy.

  The next question was, what would Kip say when he learned Kitty was here and how the lines had been drawn?

  When Kitty had left so abruptly after Aunt Garnet’s birthday party, Kip had passed it off casually. “She’ll get over it,” he had said. But she hadn’t. In fact, Cara felt that Kitty’s convictions were stronger than ever. And this time she was determined to act upon them. Kip only saw Kitty from the outside, only saw the part Kitty allowed the world to see. He could not see the deep, stubborn core inside his wife’s twin. Cara saw it. Maybe she was the only one who really did. There was a strength, a depth, an almost spiritual fervor, in Kitty’s hatred of war. It had been planted there by her experience, and nothing was going to assuage it.

  Cara sighed and hugged her arms as a cold shiver passed through her.

  Ironically, it had come to a kind of warfare.

  Eden Cottage

  Kitty’s heart was beating fast by the time she went up the flagstone walk. At the blue painted door, she hesitated a moment. Then, taking the key from her pocket, she inserted it in the lock.

  The latch lifted easily under her fingers, and the door pushed open without a noise. The arching trellis over the doorway gave off the sweet smell of roses. Memories stirred as she inhaled the fragrance.

  Kitty took a few steps inside. Shadows lurked in the corners, yet she hesitated to draw back the flowered chintz curtains and let in the light. In much the same way, she had kept herself closed, not allowing any other man, any other possibility of love, to enter her still-mourning heart.

  She walked through the rooms. Gradually she realized that the pain was not going to go away. Not ever. Once she accepted that, she could begin to find a way to bear it, to live with it.

  But could she put aside the memories that still dwelled here? Was there too much of the past? Gradually the truth came to her. This was not the place to write her book of horror, devastation, man’s inhumanity to man.

  Eden Cottage was a place for lovers. She would let it remain so. Someday two others would be happy here, she prayed. The happiness she and Richard had known together here still held its legacy. The cottage was not haunted. It would open its door, its heart, to the next loving couple to live here. It would give them its benediction. The pattern must not change. Eden Cottage must be forever a romantic haven.

  To write what she had to write required concentration, not sentiment. It would take all her self-discipline to recall the scenes, the countless incidents that made up the whole terrible picture she wanted to show to warn people that war, for whatever causes old men dreamed up, for whatever reasons they crafted to send young men off to battle, was wrong.

  It wouldn’t be possible for her to stay here and do what she had set out to do. No, she would have to go back to New York and shut herself in her apartment, where even the noise, the clatter, and the busyness of the city outside would not distract her from her purpose.

  “Must you really go?” Cara asked when Kitty came up to the house the following morning. “I promise we’d give you all the privacy you need. We wouldn’t bother you, except to bring you nourishment so you wouldn’t starve!” She made an attempt at lightness to offset the heavy feeling that hung between them. “I know you, Kitty. When you get involved in something, you don’t even remember to eat half the time.”

  “Yes, I really must go, Cara. It’s something I have to do, and I know I can’t do it here.” Kitty paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your caring.”

  The stiffness between them lengthened until Kitty made the first move. “Well, I’d better be on my way. I’ve a long drive ahead.” She hesitated a moment, then held out her arms to her twin. “Wish me well?”

  “Of course I do,” Cara said over the hard lump rising in her throat. The sisters hugged quickly. Then Kitty ran down the porch steps and to her car.

  Cara stood watching her drive away, longing for the old warmth, even the tears that used to mark all their partings. The coldness she felt was real, and she shivered. Would things ever be the same between them again?

  chapter

  11

  New York

  KITTY LIFTED HER hands from the typewriter keys as the black cloud of horror about which she had been writing dissipated slowly. Remembering had not been that difficult. Forgetting was what was hard. There were images of Richard as he had been when she first met him—straight and tall in his Canadian officer’s uniform. Then there were visions of how he had appeared after long weeks in the hospital—pale, haggard, eyes sunken. He had looked old. Even as a trained nurse used to seeing men in extremis, Kitty had been heartbroken to see this once vigorous young man so altered, so ravaged, by war.

  Although Richard had consistently tried to be cheerful, sometimes at Eden Cottage she would see a look come over his face—a haunted look that chilled her. Nothing she could say or do could erase the memories that brought this tortured expression.

  Sometimes at night she would lie awake, trying to think of ways to help him. At other times she would wake before dawn, slip out of the cottage, walk in the woods, and weep alone, away from the house, where he would not hear her sobs.

  Kitty shuddered. Determinedly, she dragged herself back to the task at hand. Richard’s tale was the terrible climax of the story she was trying to tell. To keep any other couple from enduring what they had suffered was worth the price she was paying in heart-wrenching recall.

  Kitty adjusted the lamp on her desk and once more
began to type. The pile of pages to the right of her typewriter grew steadily. She read it over, corrected, revised, rewrote.

  At last she had over fifty pages of manuscript, enough to submit with a synopsis of her book. But would anyone want to publish it? People wanted to forget the war, wanted to get on with their lives. Never mind the occupied beds in veterans’ hospitals, the men languishing there with ruined lungs, missing limbs—and worse, shattered minds.

  She constantly asked herself if this was only a personal catharsis, something that her soul needed to cleanse away the stored-up bitterness of the past. She had started her book in a frenzy of need to bring out that which had been so long bottled inside. Now she wasn’t sure if it was any good, if it told the story she wanted to tell.

  Whatever the reaction, she had to try to get it printed. She would send it to the same company that had published Richard’s poems. Before his first volume was released, everyone had told her that a book of poetry would be impossible to sell. However, they were wrong. Richard’s book had gone into a second printing, and some of the poems were now printed in anthologies, studied in college English classes. She had to try to get her book published.

  The first fifty pages of her manuscript, and a cover letter stating her qualifications as a Red Cross nurse, her personal convictions, and her reasons for writing the book, were finally packaged and addressed. Kitty took the bundle to the post office and, with a kind of resignation and a whispered prayer, mailed it.

  1937

  Evalee stared out the train window, seeing the landscape they were passing through as if for the first time. Of course, it had been five years. Gradually the scene became more familiar—the blue hills in the distance, the farmhouses set back in groves of ancient oaks or dark-green pines, the pasturelands where cows grazed peacefully, the rolling hillsides where horses ran, the tiny railroad stations whose names struck a dim chord of memory.

  Mayfield! Evalee thought. It was the home of her mother’s family, the Montroses. But it was not home to Evalee. She was coming here almost as a stranger.

  Evalee had never imagined herself coming here at all. Yet none of the tilings that had happened to her could have been predicted. A slight smile briefly touched her lips as she recalled one of the favorite sayings of her father, Randall Bondurant—“You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.” That’s what she was doing. The only reason she was coming back to Mayfield was because she had no other place to go.

  Looking down at the sleeping child curled up on the seat beside her, Evalee smoothed her pale-gold, silky hair, traced the line of her rosy cheek with one finger. How would her decision to come back here affect her daughter? Natasha had been born in France and had lived her entire life there. Evalee whispered her daughter’s name softly. What would her Virginia relatives think of a child with such a name? According to Andre’s great-aunt, Countess Irina, it was the Oblenskov family’s favorite name for girls and had been since the time of Catherine the Great.

  Evalee leaned her head back against the green cushioned seat, let her thoughts travel back to Paris. What were Andre’s mother and his aunts, uncles, and cousins all doing this minute? Probably sitting in Marushka’s shabby apartment, surrounded by photographs and icons, with the spicy scent of Russian tea simmering in the ornate samovar as she and Aunt Thalia played mah-jongg and sighed about the old days of the imperial court.

  Being with them in that setting already seemed long ago, even though it had only been a matter of weeks since she left France. She had not told them her plans until she had had everything arranged. It would have been too difficult to put up with the protests, the pleas and mournful tears. Her reluctant announcement came at last, and there were many emotional scenes. To some of Andre’s relatives, her decision to go back to the States was considered a betrayal to her husband. Over and over Evalee had had to explain that her mother, Druscilla, was now a widow, that she was her only child, Natasha her only grandchild, and that her mother was alone and wanted them nearby.

  Truthfully, Evalee had known she needed to get away, liberate herself from life among the Russian émigrés. It would have been different if only Andre…Of course, everything would have been different then.

  What she would actually do when she got to Virginia, Evalee did not know. Something would present itself, she thought hopefully. She could stay with her mother until she decided what to do.

  Had Mayfield changed? The rest of the world had. The war had changed it. Had Virginia undergone the drastic social, economic upheaval of England and France and Russia? She’d heard that the stock market crash in 1929 had plunged the country into the worst financial depression of the century. Evalee didn’t know what effect all this would have had on this small, out-of-the-way town a half day’s journey from Washington, D.C., in one direction and from Williamsburg in the other. Evalee hadn’t kept in touch with anyone in Mayfield but her mother.

  Mayfield represented many things to her, none of which she had liked or enjoyed very much. As a child, she had dreaded visits to town with her mother. She had especially disliked being made to go horseback riding. Both Cara and Kitty, her Cameron cousins, had been practically born in a saddle and were excellent horsewomen, while Evalee was frightened of horses and hated riding.

  Mayfield meant being surrounded by family. Too much family. Including Kitty and Cara, whom she used to consider rivals. When the auburn-haired twin beauties were popular belles, Evalee, the visitor, had always felt like an outsider. She had existed uncomfortably beyond the edge of a circle of which they were the center. She had often felt jealous and resentful.

  To be sure, their charmed lives were over, as was hers. Long over. All three of them were now widows. Of course, Cara had since remarried—her childhood sweetheart, Evalee’s cousin Kip Montrose. They now lived at Montclair, the family home. And Kitty had turned her loss into a medal she wore proudly, in the posthumous fame of her husband. Richard Traherne had become famous. His two books of poetry, which Kitty promoted, ranked him among the so-called war poets Rupert Brooks and Joyce Kilmer. Thus Kitty had been able to mourn openly.

  Not so with me, Evalee thought. After Andre’s death she had not been allowed the luxury of a prolonged, traditional period of mourning. She had to meet what had to be met. The need to support herself and her infant daughter had been desperate. She had had to find a job. Anything to pay the rent, buy food. For someone who had never before worked a day in her life, it had been a terrifying experience.

  At first she had taken any work she could get—as a helper in a bakery, as a stock clerk in a shoe store. These jobs hardly paid a living wage. She earned only slightly more than a street sweeper or laundry worker. She finally went to work in a department store. She knew it was her looks that got her the job. The dramatic combination of blond hair and brown eyes was emphasized by the simple black sheaths that the store, La Mode, made their salesclerks wear. Evalee was exactly the image they wanted to project.

  It was there that one of those sudden incidents that seemed to mark her life had occurred. A male customer asked her to model a hat he was buying for his wife. A new possibility for earning money was presented to her by a fellow employee, who pointed out that her slim, boyish figure was perfect for styles the French couturier Chanel had made popular.

  Encouraged, Evalee had tried a little modeling. However, she had soon discovered that a model’s irregular schedule was too demanding for someone with a child. However, through this she landed a job in an exclusive Rue de la Paix shop. Her aloof manner, which really covered her shyness, proved an advantage, because there were no snootier shop girls in the world than the ones in Paris boutiques. The pay was only a few sous higher than the department store, but she was paid a bonus for pushing the most expensive exotic fragrances, the price of an ounce of which would have kept Natasha and her in food and clothing for a year.

  It was work that had bored her. A dead-end job. Evalee knew she wanted more for her daughter, more for herself. Finally she decided to go back to Ame
rica. Surely it was still a land of opportunity for someone with intelligence and ambition.

  How all this would work out in Mayfield, she had no idea. Where could she fit in? In a town as provincial as Mayfield, her European experience, her foreign name, might be an asset. After all, she was a countess. A meaningless title in a nonexistent court, but nonetheless…Perhaps, for whatever it was worth, it might be useful. How? What could she become? A dressmaker? An advisor on women’s fashion? A designer or a decorator? An idea began to take shape in her mind as the train roared through the tunnel, up the grade, and over the trestle toward Mayfield.

  In the South to which she was returning, family background—who you were related to—was everything. Evalee’s mother had been a member of the Montrose family, which was one of the FFVs, the First Families of Virginia. The Montroses had been famous for generations as landowners, tobacco growers, horse breeders, and more recently as soldiers, statesmen, men of power and influence. Cousin Scott Cameron was the editor of the town’s weekly newspaper, the Mayfield Monitor. Another cousin, Lynette, was married to a state senator. Such family connections might prove as important to Evalee in Virginia now as they had to the Oblenskovs in St. Petersburg before the Revolution.

  Evalee knew she was far different from the young woman who had gone gaily off to Europe. Even her mother never knew the true circumstances to which Evalee’s marriage had brought her. Tragedy had thrown her to her knees. She had been through so much, had endured so much. Most important, she had learned to trust God.

  As a little girl, Evalee used to always declare, after hearing one of her favorite fairy tales, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a prince and live happily ever after.…” Well, her childhood dream had come true. She had married a prince—a count, actually. But one without a castle, without even a country.

  Later she began to see the fantasy his family lived—they believed that the Romanovs would eventually be restored and that they would all return to Mother Russia in triumph. In a kind of blind illusion, they held stubbornly to this belief while living in futile hope in shabby hotels and run-down apartments, on the brink of dire poverty. Soon it all began to wear thin to Evalee. She saw it for what it was—a vain dream.