Wedding of the Season by Laura Lee Guhrke Page B

realized Eugenia was looking at an album of photographs. “Why, that’s Papa,” she exclaimed, leaning forward to study the sepia-toned image of a man with her own dark eyes and a resolute face. Looking at the image, Beatrix felt a stab of pain, for though he’d been dead over a year now, she still missed her father terribly. He’d always been strict, but she’d always been the center of his life. Looking at the photograph, she forced herself to laugh a little. “Poor Papa. He looks as if he has indigestion.”
    Eugenia laughed as well. “My brother-in-law hated photographs. He thought them so uncivilized. But your mother was dabbling in photography at the time—” She stopped and bit her lip.
    Beatrix’s mother was a subject that had not been mentioned in this house since she was nine years old. She’d never actually been told that her mother had run off to France to paint, accompanied by her lover, a man ten years her junior, or that she’d died in Paris, ill, ruined, and alone. Beatrix had found out those details on her own. Her girlhood friends had thought it all so romantic and tragic, but Beatrix had never been able to see the romantic aspect. All she’d seen was her father’s anguish.
    Will had expected her to abandon Papa and go running to the other side of the world for what might have been years? If she’d done that, her father would have died alone and abandoned, just as her mother had.
    The old resentments, ones she thought she’d conquered, began simmering up, and she shoved them back down. “Show me more of these photographs, Auntie.”
    Eugenia turned a page. “Ah, my wedding,” she said, clearly relieved that there seemed to be no more pictures taken by Beatrix’s mother.
    Beatrix leaned closer and laughed again. “Oh, Auntie, look at your dress!”
    “It does seem quite old-fashioned, doesn’t it? That enormous bustle and train. And all those roses. Still, it was a Worth gown.” She patted her niece’s knee. “Not having a daughter of my own, I’d hoped you would have it made over to wear at your wedding.”
    “Auntie . . .” she began, then let her voice trail off, for they had discussed all this before.
    “I know, dear. You want your own gown. Perfectly understandable. And you want to support your friend in her dressmaking efforts.”
    She felt a hint of impatience. “It’s not an effort, Auntie. It’s a business.”
    Eugenia gave a sniff. “Of a kind. How her brother ever allowed her to engage in it in the first place, I can’t think. But then Marlowe is rather permissive in many respects. His publishing company, his divorce from his first wife—oh, I know what you’re going to say, dear,” she added as Beatrix started to speak. “And I do appreciate that Marlowe’s second wife is a most respectable woman in every way. I adore Emma, you know I do. Nonetheless, I do feel there is a certain disregard for convention in Marlowe’s household, including the fact that he allows his sister to engage in trade.”
    “Being unconventional is not necessarily a bad thing.” Beatrix ran her finger idly along one edge of the album in her aunt’s lap. “Besides, Vivian enjoys her dressmaking business.”
    “Nonsense. Fussing with account books and bartering with tradesmen and negotiating contracts? How can that be enjoyable? And think of the burden of responsibility! Using one’s talents for purposes of commerce?”
    Something in Eugenia’s words sent a strange spark of excitement through Beatrix’s veins. “Oh, I don’t know, Auntie. It might be satisfying.”
    “I don’t see how. Oh, inventing pretty gowns for one’s friends is an agreeable pastime, I daresay. And sewing and sketching are both perfectly suitable pursuits for a lady. But to employ those talents for money? To sell the clothes one designs to one’s friends? Why, they might not pay, and then one would have to send demands. How disagreeable.”
    Beatrix forced herself not to roll her eyes. Sometimes,