Twin of Fire Read online

  She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Then I met your father. For some reason, he decided he wanted me, and I don’t really think I had much say in it. He came into my life with his extraordinary handsomeness, and I don’t think I ever even considered saying no to him.

  “But then we were married, and there was one crisis after another to handle, all of them caused by Bill’s lust for life. Even when William produced children, he made twins; one child wasn’t enough for him.”

  She looked down at her hands, and there were tears in her eyes. “I thought I’d die, too, after Bill passed away. I didn’t seem to have a reason for living, but then I began to remember things that I had once enjoyed, such as needlework, and of course I had you girls. Then Mr. Gates came along. He was as different as night and day from Bill, and he liked what Bill used to call my ‘busywork.’ Mr. Gates had rigid ideas of what a woman should and should not do. He didn’t expect me to spend Sunday afternoons climbing mountains with him as Bill used to. No, Mr. Gates wanted to provide a lovely home for me, and I was to stay in that home and tend to my children and give tea parties in the afternoons. As I got to know the man more, I found that he was easy to please, and that the things that came naturally to me quite often were the ones that he expected from me. With your father, I was never quite sure what I was supposed to do.”

  She looked up at Blair. “So I found I was in love with him. What I wanted to do and his ideas of what I should do matched perfectly. I’m afraid that I didn’t really think of you girls, or realize how much like Bill both of you were. I knew you were like your father, and so I arranged for you to live with Henry, but I thought Houston was like me, and she is to some extent. But Houston is also like her father, and it comes out in odd ways, such as her dressing as an old woman and going into the mine camps. Bill would have done something like that.”

  Blair was silent for a long time as she thought about what her mother had said, and she wondered if she could ever love Leander. She’d known for sure that she was in love with Alan, but she hadn’t been exactly devastated when he’d jilted her. There was too much bound up in what had happened. She couldn’t look at Lee without remembering that her sister had loved him so much and for so long, and now Houston was going to have to watch him marry someone else.

  Blair didn’t sleep much the night before the wedding, and it seemed that all the demons of the night were still there in the morning. The bright sunlight of the day couldn’t rid her of her sense of doom.

  For the last few days, she’d managed to forget for whole minutes that she was marrying her sister’s intended, but then she’d always believed that it would never actually happen. She had thought that somehow she’d get out of marrying Leander, and Houston could have him back.

  At ten o’clock, they left for Taggert’s house, where the wedding was being held, Opal and the twins riding in Houston’s pretty little carriage, one of the many gifts from Taggert, the stableboy behind, driving a big wagon that Houston had borrowed, the wedding dresses hidden inside muslin in the back. They were silent all the way to the house. When Blair asked Houston what she was thinking, Houston said she hoped that the lilies had arrived undamaged.

  Blair knew that this was further proof that her sister’s major interest in the man she was marrying was his monetary worth.

  And once Blair saw Taggert’s house, she was sure that Houston had sold herself to the god of money.

  The house looked as if it were carved out of a mountain of marble: cool and white and vast. The downstairs was dominated by a big, sweeping, double staircase that curved up two sides of a hallway that was bigger than that in any house Blair’d ever seen.

  “We’ll come down there,” Houston said, pointing toward the stairs. “One of us on each side.” Surrounded by a bevy of prettily dressed girlfriends, she sauntered away and started an inspection of the house, while Blair stood where she was.

  “It takes a while to get used to,” Opal whispered to her daughter. There was a feeling about the place that it wasn’t real, that it was out of a fairy tale and that it would disappear as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Houston plans to live in this?” Blair whispered back.

  “It does seem smaller when Kane is here,” Opal assured her. “I think we should go upstairs now. There’s no telling what Houston has planned for us.”

  Blair followed her mother up the wide stairs, looking over her shoulder all the time to the floor below. Everywhere she looked, she saw exotic arrangements of flowers and greenery, and on the landing she paused to look out the window to the grounds below. They were beautiful, with a lush lawn and shrubberies.

  Opal paused beside her. “That’s the service yard. You should see the garden.”

  Blair didn’t say any more as she followed her mother up to the second floor and the private family rooms.

  “Houston’s put you in here,” Opal said, opening the door to a tall-ceilinged room with a white marble fireplace that was carved with swags and flowers. The couches, chairs, and tables in the room should have been in museums.

  “This is the sitting room and through here is the bedroom and that’s the bath. Each guest room has a sitting room and a bath all its own.”

  Blair ran her hand along the marble basin in the bathroom and, although she’d never seen any before and couldn’t be sure, she thought the fixtures might be gold. “Brass?” she asked her mother.

  “He wouldn’t have it in his house,” Opal said with some pride. “Now, I must go and see if Houston needs any help. You have hours before you need to be ready, so why don’t you take a nap?”

  Blair started to protest that she couldn’t possibly sleep, but then she looked at the enormous marble tub and thought that she’d like to make use of it.

  As soon as she was alone, she filled the tub with steamy hot water and climbed into it, the water relaxing her instantly. She stayed in there a long time, until her skin began to wrinkle, and then stepped out and dried with a towel so thick it could have been a pillow. She wrapped herself in a pink cashmere robe and went into the bedroom, where she promptly fell asleep on the big, soft bed.

  When she woke, she felt rested and clear-headed, and she remembered her mother’s words of there being a garden in the back of the house. Quickly, she dressed in her usual simple skirt and blouse and left the room. Not wanting to use the main staircase, since she could hear muffled voices below, she went down a corridor past closed doors and eventually found a back staircase that led into a maze of kitchen and storage rooms on the first floor. Every inch of these rooms was filled with people scurrying back and forth and creating wonderful smells of food. Blair had a difficult time getting through the crowd. Several people saw her, but no one had time to comment on a bride being in the kitchen two hours before the wedding began. Blair was only concerned that Houston didn’t see her. No doubt Houston had a timetable and she would keep to it no matter what happened. Houston would never find time to slip away into the garden.

  Behind the house was a lawn that was now covered with enormous tents, and tables with pink linen tablecloths, and hundreds of vases of flowers. Men and women in uniforms were hurrying in and out of the house to put food and condiments on the tables.

  Blair hurried past these people, too, and went to what looked to be the garden below. When she first stepped into the edge of the garden, she was unprepared for what she saw. Before her rolled acres of winding paths, appearing and disappearing amid plants such as she’d never seen before. Tentatively, she began to follow a path.

  The commotion of the wedding preparations disappeared behind her and, for the first time in days, she felt free to think.

  This was her wedding day, but right now she couldn’t remember how she had got here. Three weeks ago, she was in Pennsylvania and she had her entire future mapped out. But how different everything had turned out! Alan had run away rather than marry her. Her sister had lost the man she loved and was now marrying one of the richest men in the country —without any love invol