For my True Bride.
“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?” DIANA SAID, GLOWING with joy as she turned the lapis-encrusted cross with the inscription on the back. She ran her fingers along the letters, longing for a way to be his real bride instead. But she already knew that could not be. Since they had left the greenhouse, every moment with Henry felt imbued with its own rare luster. The sounds of the city on its way to work were just outside their carriage, but they might as well have been coming from across the river.
“My father gave it to my mother before they were married. I’ve never understood what it meant. I suppose he might have given it to the seventeen-year-old girl he married in the hope that she would always be seventeen.” Henry gave a muted, ironic laugh. “But that’s not why I’m giving it to you.”
“I know,” Diana said as she tucked the cross into her bodice.
“It’s more understated than all the things he gave her later; maybe that’s why I like it. I don’t remember her very well; I was only four when she died. But I think she was that old-fashioned, natural kind of beautiful that doesn’t benefit from all the ornament.”
Diana took this in. She had learned so much about Henry over the last evening that he practically constituted an entirely new person, and everything he said now seemed a wink to her special knowledge. She leaned forward from her seat in the plain buggy, the one vehicle Henry could possibly have managed to borrow unnoticed from the Schoonmaker carriage house, and around the black folding top. They were paused on Broadway, waiting for the right moment for Diana to slip into the morning crowd and make her way home. She turned her sleepy, adoring eyes back on him and tried to smile as best she could. “It’ll be hard watching you marry Liz, Henry….” She had intended something more finalizing and profound, but her throat was constricting so painfully now that she knew she wouldn’t be able to say any more.
Henry kissed her below her right eye. Diana took a final look at him before pulling her hood firmly over her face and slipping down to the street. Once her feet touched the ground, she found it easy to move forward and join the hordes on their morning route. All around her, men in bowlers and cheap three-piece suits walked at a swift gait that didn’t allow for time to wonder at the darting girl with the hood.
Before long she had found the alley off Nineteenth Street, which led into the Van Dorans’ property and then into her own family’s. She had risked the trellis the night before, which had been nearly as dangerous as venturing out by herself into the New York night, but today she took the easier route of the hatch door into the basement washing room. From there it was a breathless dash up the servants’ stairs and she was on the second floor and very close to the door to her own safe bedroom.
There was nobody there, which was some kind of relief, but the room was altered from when she had left it. All the dresses that she’d pulled out to consider wearing for her evening with Henry had been put away. All her high-heeled slippers, too. And sitting on top of her neatly made bed was the hat that Henry had worn on the day they met. Anxiety began to grip at Diana as she went to the bowler and picked it up. She was frozen in place, immobile with the sad, awful thought of who had been there the night before.