Jennie About to Be by Elisabeth Ogilvie Page A

Jennie secretly hated the abrupt drop from courtship into controlled chaos. How could love possibly survive it?
    Everyone else seemed happy enough with it. There were new clothes all around; even Uncle Higham had a new suit made in which to give her away, and was seen to smile complacently when some especially handsome gift arrived. Nigel was pounced upon by Sophie and Charlotte the instant he appeared and was taken to see the latest. He always said obligingly, “My word!” no matter what it was. Occasionally he threw in something like “Very distingué ,” or “ Très recherché , what?”
    Once when Jennie was alone with him for a moment, she hugged his arm with both her hands and said, “Oh, Nigel, we’re two babes in the woods being showered with gifts instead of leaves by a crowd of very peculiar robins. I supposed I may be house-proud one day and wear a lace cap indoors and cherish these things, but right now I can’t see what they have to do with you and me.”
    â€œI know, my sweet chuck.” He kissed her. “Pity that we’re expected to behave like settled householders, ain’t it? But that’s only while they’re watching us. Wait till we get to Scotland. How do you fancy being chased through the heather like one of those nymphs, wearing only a bit of gauze, which will come off in the escape?”
    She pressed her face into his now-civilian lapel to stifle laughter while Aunt Higham greeted callers in the foyer. It was going to be all right; better than all right.
    On the day before the wedding, with most of the packing done, all the fittings over, the wedding cake in the pantry veiled like another bride in protective gauze, there was a sudden lull. Aunt Higham retired to her room to rest, and the children were all taken by Mademoiselle to the birthday celebration of a young Higham cousin. Jennie asked Nigel to go with her to Tamsin’s grave.
    They walked, at her request; she had not had a long walk for days. London, the day before her wedding, was dank and gray, the sun a phantom through layers of dirty, stinking smoke. They bought lilies of the valley from a street vendor and went looking for Tamsin’s grave in the crowded burial ground of a little church on the edge of a slum. The older stones, blackened and illegible, toppled toward each other in such confusion one would think the bodies they marked had been buried in like confusion. A gravedigger found Tamsin’s grave for them; he had dug it. There had been no room to put her beside her mother, he said.
    It wouldn’t have mattered to Tamsin, who’d had no time to mourn; from the moment her dear mother had been carried away from the sordid room, the child had been engaged in a battle to survive.
    Carolus Hawthorne had taught his daughters that the body was nothing once the soul had gone, that it was pagan to make an altar of a grave; he’d like to have been buried in a corner of the orchard with no marker, and he had forbidden them to wear mourning.
    Tamsin was surely free of her terrified little body, but Jennie was almost overcome at the sight of the name Thomasina on the stone. She gripped the lilies of the valley tightly, and her face went cold and still, as pale as the flowers in her hands.
    Nigel’s arm came around her waist. “Tell me about this,” he urged gently.
    â€œWhen I was miserable, she was so much more miserable, and she had reason to be. The very sight of her made me ashamed of my own weakness.”
    â€œShe was only thirteen,” he said, reading the stone. “What could a child of that age be so miserable about?”
    â€œNigel, don’t you know ”—she flared at him—“even if you’re too fastidious to think about it, that all children aren’t nicely raised? Don’t you know about the little ones being sold to chimney sweeps, and sent to the factories and mines? And the children sold on the street