The Windsor Knot

“What? No footmen?” Geoffrey inquired.

Elizabeth made a face at him. “You’re going to be absolutely unbearable about all this, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Unbearable is such a subjective thing. I plan to enjoy myself hugely, though, which may prove annoying to you.”

“I expect it will,” said Elizabeth, handing him a totebag full of books. “You usually manage to make me feel like a perfect fool.”

“When, alas, my goal is ever to prevent you from being one.” He inspected the totebag and drew out the topmost book: The Royal Wedding. “Too late, I see!”

“I refuse to be cross with you, Geoffrey,” said Elizabeth with a little laugh. “This is going to be the happiest day of my life.”

“Yes,” said Geoffrey. “I was afraid that it might.” He flipped through the book, solemnly studying the color photographs of the glass coach, the sailor-suited page boys, and the red-liveried horsemen in the wedding procession. “And is this a portent of things to come? I’m afraid Chandler Grove doesn’t run to landaus, but the high-school pep club could probably fix you up a float with some pastel toilet paper and twenty feet of chicken wire.”

“I don’t want a royal wedding,” said Elizabeth between clenched teeth. “But I would like a lovely and memorable ceremony, since I hope to do this only once.”

“Leave the bags here,” said Geoffrey, setting the books down. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Shouldn’t I go in and say hello to everyone else?”

“They’re watching Jeopardy,” said Geoffrey. “You may as well wait until that’s over if you want them to notice you. Come on.”

Elizabeth looked for a long minute at the white castle across the road, and then with a little shudder she turned away. “All right,” she said. “But let’s not walk toward that.”

“It is rather ominous, isn’t it?” said Geoffrey. “I see it every day, and yet it still gives me chills. It’s strange how you remember someone who has died violently, even if you weren’t particularly fond of them.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I know, but I truly don’t want to think of him just now. Do you suppose that my coming here to have the wedding will bring back sad memories of Eileen?”

“Perhaps,” said Geoffrey. “But at least you will be making new memories to overshadow the old ones. That may help.”

They walked around to the back of the house, where a well-tended lawn gradually gave way to a field of tall grass that stretched a hundred yards or more to the edge of the woods.

“It’s so beautiful here,” said Elizabeth, stopping to admire a bank of cabbage roses. “It makes the twentieth century seem far away.”

“Well, it is,” said Geoffrey. “Unfortunately, one must commute there.”

“Yes. I don’t know where we’re going to live. It’s very hard to manage with two careers.”

“I should have thought that your two particular careers might make it easier than most,” Geoffrey observed. “Obviously, he has to be near an ocean, on account of the seals, and you will find that there are dead bodies everywhere, so it shouldn’t matter where you live.”

Elizabeth frowned. “There’s a bit more to it than that.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First comes the wedding. Now, you are sure that you want to do this? Because I have seen you go off on some tangents that would make the Flying Dutchman seem carefully navigated.”

“It isn’t a whim,” said Elizabeth softly.

“Well, I do rather like Cameron. He isn’t the wet dishcloth you usually become enamored of. I suppose he knows what he’s doing?”

“You will have to ask him,” said Elizabeth dryly.

“And all this undue haste isn’t just to meet the Queen? I have to tell you it sounds like a silly reason for getting married.”

“You sound like Bill!” said Elizabeth, regarding Geoffrey with considerable surprise. “I haven’t ever heard you sound so serious and responsible.”

“I am Captain Grandfather’s understudy,” said Geoffrey with a grin. “Which you may take as a warning that you will probably be having this conversation again.”

“Perhaps I should make an announcement,” said Elizabeth. “This is not sudden and I am not impetuous. But the garden-party invitation is a great honor, and it seemed all right to rearrange our plans in view of it.”

“You sound sane,” said Geoffrey doubtfully. “But then so does Ernie Barlow when he talks about getting flying- saucer transmissions on his bridge-work.”

“It’s going to be all right, Geoffrey,” Elizabeth assured him. She played her trump card. “In fact, I was hoping that since you have such a wonderful sense of style, you might help me plan some of the arrangements for the wedding.”

“We’ll talk,” said Geoffrey, looking smug. “I may have one or two little ideas.”

Dearest Dawsons,

Wherever I wander (just now I’m in Rome), Rest assured that you’re thought of by your

GARDEN GNOME

Cheerie Bye!

* * *

CHAPTER 7

CLARINE MASON DIDN’T feel like dusting her husband Emmet’s picture. She didn’t feel like dusting Emmet, either.

Her feet were tired, her back ached, and she was positive she was coming down with a cold. She tossed her feather duster onto the glass-topped coffee table and plopped down on the sofa. Living by yourself didn’t make the work that much easier, not in a big old farmhouse like this one-Emmet’s family homestead, one of the original houses in the community of Chandler Grove. Trust him to stick her with a barn like this. Sure, she could skimp on the cooking and serve leftovers three times running, but the house got dusty just as fast, and now she had Emmet’s chores to do as well as her own. There was an acre of yard to mow, and screens to patch, and the back-porch steps needed fixing. Why, it would have been a load of work for a woman half her age. When folks at church asked her if she missed Emmet, the very thought of all those extra chores brought tears to her eyes, and she could say with perfect sincerity, “Oh, I do miss him! More than ever!”

The tin roof would need painting before winter.

Clarine cast a sour look at the smiling features of Emmet J. Mason, neatly encased in an art nouveau silver frame on the mantelpiece. People used to say he looked like Conway Twitty, which Emmet used to take as a compliment. The country singer and Emmet both had blue-black hair that they wore fluffed up like cotton candy, and they had beefy faces with little round eyes that shone with the sincerity of a snake-oil preacher. A lot Emmet cared about the chores or the state of her health. When had he ever cared about anything but his crazy obsession?

Well, there had been a time when Emmet had been interested in her and in his hometown, but years of exasperation had obscured those pleasant memories, replacing them with half-remembered quarrels and with the numbness that set in when nothing Emmet said or did mattered to her anymore. Clarine tried to remember the Emmet she’d married in 1958; maybe she ought to put his highschool photo on the mantelpiece instead of the later one. He’d seemed like such a nice, steady boy in those days. He had played high-school varsity football, which had impressed the shy sophomore Clarine, and he’d worked weekends in his father’s hardware store. It was understood that he was going to take over the business one day.

She had got engaged to him at seventeen, when he went in the army, and she’d written him letters on pink