Dear Diana,
I once gave you a piece of jewelry
inscribed For My True Bride,
and I feel the same now as then, if
not more so. I know it must be
difficult for you to believe, but what I
am about to do is loath some to me.
Trust me when I tell you she left
me with no other options…
HENRY DID NOT LOOK TO SEE THE CITY GO BY, and when the Schoonmakers’ private railway car did emerge in the suburbs, he found little of interest in the rivers and icy landscapes that passed. He was not leaving willingly. He was leaving mechanically, which was the way he did everything these days. He had dressed by rote, in high white collar and black jacket, and he had combed and slicked his hair in the same habitual manner. This was the same manner he had used in writing notes to his friends, asking them to be his groomsmen, and to his usual salesman at Tiffany, who had arranged for the rings. The refrain in his mind was a kind of habit too. He told himself over and over that he was doing the good and heroic thing and that his actions would save Diana from certain ruin.
Now, as the train drew him closer to Tuxedo and a fate he found miserable while not yet being able to imagine, he tried to compose a letter that might explain what he had done. Diana must have heard by now. They would all be talking, and her mother would no doubt weigh against her daughter’s former fiancé for getting engaged again so quickly, without any knowledge of how painful and humiliating the news would be to her other child. He couldn’t stand the idea of Diana hearing from someone else. He would have liked to have held her and shown that it was all for her protection, but he doubted she would want that anymore. He’d never done anything heroic before, and he was unpleasantly surprised by how lousy it felt.
He’d written the letter a hundred ways in his head. He had explained that marrying Penelope was the only solution and the easiest one, that it would give Diana a second chance that circumstances made impossible for him. In one moment, he resolved to tell her that they would always be lovers, and in another that he would leave her alone so that she could have other, grander loves. He drew himself as a valiant savior and Penelope as girl made of pure evil, but he had ceased believing any of those things. There was no way to make sense with words of what had happened.
His bride-to-be was coming for him down the aisle of the train, resting her hands on the velvet seats to steady herself, but beaming with such confidence that she hardly seemed to need to lean on anything. She had been on the other end of the private car with the little girls who were going to distribute rose petals at the beginning of the ceremony, showing off her new diamond to them. She was wearing a white cashmere coat with a high collar, and her lips were painted the red of pomegranate seeds. Henry watched her coming toward him and crumpled the letter he had been writing to the girl he’d called his true bride. There was nothing more to say.