The Wedding Veil(70)

Babs shrugged but I saw the smile she tried to hide. “Your meddling mother… It is nothing, really. An old friend and I were dancing, and your mother and aunt nearly had a coronary. The first ambulance of the day was for the fifty-eight-year-olds. It seems a little wrong, doesn’t it?”

I wondered if Miles did the same thing to her heart that Conner did to mine, even at her age.

We stopped to admire the stunning indoor winter garden, one of my favorite places at Biltmore. The round, sunken room off the entrance hall, held up by columns, was filled with flowers and swathed in greenery.

“Babs, you don’t have to placate me. You can tell me the truth about Miles. I won’t say anything to Mom and Aunt Alice.”

She rolled her eyes, and I had to laugh at the role reversal, my interrogating her about her boyfriend. “Well, if you must know, he was a beau of mine in our early twenties. We adored each other, but he wasn’t the one. But now he’s come back, and I, like you, am torn as to what I should do about it.”

I tucked her hand in the crook of my arm.

“I think your new relationship is wonderful, Babs. I want you to find love again. As a very wise woman once told me, ‘Life is short, dear one. We must make the absolute most of it.’?”

“So you don’t feel as though I’m betraying your grandfather?”

I laughed. “Babs, what you and Pops had was… poetry. It was a love sonnet in motion. But just because you might not have poetry again doesn’t mean you can’t have frothy prose.”

Babs squeezed my arm and we smiled knowingly at each other. That mischievous glimmer—the one I hadn’t seen since Pops died—was back. And I had to think that maybe this Miles person had something to do with that.

I studied the motion and balance of the Boy Stealing Geese statue in the center of the winter garden. “The Karl Bitter statues have always been one of my favorite things about Biltmore. And surrounded with wedding flowers…”

Babs and I skipped the music room, hustled through the loggia, and stopped in the library, where we both gasped at the full, bustled gown worn by Helena Bonham Carter in Frankenstein. Every space, it seemed, had at least a costume or two from the fashion exhibit.

“That embroidery is breathtaking,” Babs said.

It was. But I was only interested in one wedding gown. “Ma’am?” I asked the uniformed Biltmore guide behind the velvet ropes. “Where is Cornelia Vanderbilt’s wedding outfit?”

She smiled. “Oh, all the Vanderbilt reproductions and heirlooms are on display at Antler Hill Village.”

That meant getting back in the car and driving, but Antler Hill—which originally housed Antler Hall, where all the estate families would gather for celebrations—was one of my favorite places on-site.

“Thank you!” I said, turning on my heels.

“Wait,” Babs said. “We aren’t going to finish the tour? I want to see the dresses!”

“After,” I said. “But the anticipation of seeing Cornelia’s is killing me!” I couldn’t wait to see that wedding veil.

Babs grumbled. “Fine. I will go. I will look at the veil. I will show you that it is strikingly different from our wedding veil. And then we will finish the tour and drink wine.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” I said.

“What I don’t understand,” Babs said, as we made our way back to the car, “is where this crazy notion came from in the first place. I think I brought you here a time too many when you were a little girl.”

I laughed, opening the car door. “Well, it looks exactly like our wedding veil. And our wedding veil was gifted to my great-grandmother—your mother—under odd circumstances. I mean, you just never know.”

Babs laughed. “Honey, that’s a bit of a stretch.”

“Fine,” I said. “Maybe it is. But I just have this feeling. Isn’t that enough?”

I drove us through the lush green mountainous miles to the village. Whereas Biltmore House was extravagant and gorgeous—and original—Antler Hill was fairly new, more of an ode to George Vanderbilt’s farming roots, so it had a very rustic-chic, barnyard-at-its-best kind of feel.

We made our way down the pebbled concrete path to the front door of the Biltmore Legacy building. With a stone foundation, wood accents, and a mansard roofline, it very much had the feel of a converted barn and silo. We paused at the pair of wooden front doors. “Are you ready?”

Babs crossed her arms. “For what? For you to realize how wrong you are? Yes. Yes, I am. For heaven’s sake, Julia. My mother was gifted that veil by a Russian woman.”

“How in the world would she have gotten it from a Russian woman?” I asked as I held the door open for her and followed her inside.

“Sweetheart, do you remember Gran? I wouldn’t put anything at all past her.”

As if by instinct, we both walked straight to the display of the reproduction of Cornelia’s wedding outfit, ensconced in glass. We walked around the side of the case to get as good a look at the veil as we could.

“It’s the Juliet cap that really gets me,” I whispered. “The two rows of pearls at the bottom, one at the top, that intricate lace in the middle.” Spotlights shone on the delicate piece of tulle and lace that spread behind the Cornelia mannequin. Just seeing it made me feel nervous, like I was in the presence of greatness.