The Ripper's Wife(8)
A knock on the door told us it was time. My knees buckled beneath my gown. Suddenly I wanted to sit down on the floor and bawl like a baby. But Mama was there, bearing me up, giving me strength.
“Just think of it, Florie. You an’ Jim are embarkin’ on a grand adventure!”
I took a deep breath and stood up straight and Mama walked around me, arranging my veil. Silver and white mingled so closely in its fine mesh I could never decide if it was more silver or white, and little embroidered silver flowers, seed pearls, and crystals encrusted its edges. The mirrors and my mother’s eyes told me that I looked like a princess, and now, I knew, I must behave like one.
With a nod of approval Mama pressed a bouquet of white lilies and roses framed by scalloped silver-veined lace into my hands, and I walked forward to confidently embrace my destiny.
“Everythin’ will be all right,” Mama whispered in my ear as she relinquished my arm to Holbrook, to walk me down the aisle, and with all my heart and soul I believed her. Like a sudden summer storm, all my fears had passed.
The smiling faces of our guests passed by me in a blur. The women’s gowns and feathered hats were like sherbet-colored clouds. Ever afterward whenever someone told me they were at my wedding, I would just nod and smile; I had to take their word for it. Those pink fairy floss clouds my head was wrapped in kept me from even remembering meeting Jim’s brothers, Michael and Edwin, though it was little more than a hasty smile, a “how d’you do?,” and a peck upon the cheek. I couldn’t have described those fellows fifteen minutes later if the police had asked me to. All I saw was the shining bright dream of the future and Jim, standing at the altar, waiting for me in his new suit with a white satin waistcoat embroidered with the same pattern of silver roses and lilies as my gown, and his lucky diamond horseshoe winking at me from his silver silk cravat. I was blind to everything and everyone else.
When I took my place at his side I smiled and spontaneously reached out and took his hand. “This is the start of a grand adventure!” I whispered.
“Indeed it is!” Jim agreed with a smile as bright as my own, and squeezed my hand tight.
As one, we faced forward, toward the future, together, and became man and wife. We never looked back.
We sped across the Channel. The wind and the tide were with us, like dear old friends wishing us well, hurrying us on to happiness; even the gulls seemed to shout, Godspeed! We made the crossing in four hours and were at the hotel and in our evening clothes just in time to sit down to supper, our first as man and wife.
I’ll never forget that first meal: rosemary chicken, tender green asparagus, buttery new potatoes rolled in herbs, and a lemon custard cake, a golden marvel of a cake, with custard and lemon jelly between each sumptuous spongy-gold layer, the top drizzled with rich ribbons of the most decadent dark chocolate I had ever tasted. I vowed from the very first bite that every year on our anniversary and whenever we had something special to celebrate this would be our dinner.
The next eight weeks were heavenly, all kisses and bliss. Every night I fell asleep with my head on my husband’s chest, listening to his heartbeat, soothing and steady, with his arms holding me. Every morning I awakened to a room filled with roses, thinking I had died and gone to Heaven and a perfumed cloud was now my bed. I was in my husband’s arms, and that was heaven to me. The initial pain, the “necessary unpleasantness” Mama had mentioned, was past so quickly it was nothing—Mama had been right; “one faces worse ordeals at the dentist”—and I experienced only pleasure. I recall it all now only in a series of pretty pictures, like an album filled with postcards from days gone by, pictures of a rosy past that may or may not have been real. I don’t know anymore; I just can’t remember it without that soft, romantic, rosy golden glow. Maybe the truth is I don’t want to.
Though Mama and Holbrook were also in Paris, Jim and I didn’t see them or anyone else we knew. We shunned all society save our own, wanting no one but each other.
“This,” Jim said, “is our time.”
“Ours alone,” I agreed.
Jim took me to Versailles, to view the gilded remains of a vanished world burned and blown away on the hot and violent winds of revolution. I was elated yet, at the same time, so terribly sad when I traversed the Hall of Mirrors, supremely conscious of my shoes echoing upon the marble floor as I followed in the ghostly footsteps of Marie Antoinette.
To cheer me out of my sudden blue doldrums, Jim pulled me into his arms and began to waltz with me. Seeing my reflection in my sky-blue linen suit and hat, rakishly tilted and crowned with a bevy of weeping blue ostrich plumes, passing in a whirl of swirling skirts and swaying feathers, I forgot—just for a moment—that I was a grown-up married lady and, like a little girl, imagined that I was Marie Antoinette and the belle of the ball all blurred into one.
Later, I stood outside the Petit Trianon and tried to envision Marie Antoinette in one of her white shepherdess dresses with adoring courtiers surrounding her like a flock of sheep. From the time I was a little girl I had been fascinated by tales of the tragic queen. I had several postcards with her likeness and others evocative of the times in which she had lived pasted in my album. I loved the splendid panniered gowns with their ladders of bows climbing the bodices, billows of lace at the sleeves, like bridal veils for the elbows, and the towering befeathered and bejeweled powdered coiffures. “Dresses decorated like birthday cakes and hair like wedding cakes with sugar roses and swags of candy pearls,” I said to Jim’s amusement as we stood before a wall of gilt-framed portraits. I loved to hear his hearty chuckle, to know that he was laughing with me, not at me.