Once Elizabeth had got so caught up in her nuptial fantasies that she remarked aloud to Jake, “Would I love to get married in St. Paul’s Cathedral!”
Jake looked up from his Tony Hillerman novel and said, “Why? You don’t know anybody in Minnesota, do you?”
But there were drawbacks to the royal wedding that Elizabeth would not have to contend with. She comforted herself with those thoughts. No need of security guards. No government interference, forcing you to slight friends and distant relations in favor of foreign dignitaries. And nobody making the decisions for you about the reception food, the honeymoon, and all the other delightful details of planning the event. Face it, she told herself, Diana had very little say-so in that wedding.
Which brought her to the other depressing fact she had gleaned from her reading: by American standards the Princess of Wales was not even a high-school graduate. “That puts my Ph.D. in perspective,” Elizabeth had remarked. She would gladly give Diana any number of IQ points if she could also transfer to the princess a pound of weight per point.
Why couldn’t I be dumb and thin? she asked herself. Clearly, Princess Diana did not bear thinking about.
Thank God for Fergie.
The other royal wedding, that of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, had been much more to Elizabeth’s liking. Elizabeth couldn’t even daydream herself into the role of a svelte blonde ice princess marrying the heir apparent, but the plump and clever Duchess of York was a bride that she could identify with. She read the hastily published biographies of the newlyweds with considerable interest.
Sarah Ferguson was a full twenty-six when she married Prince Andrew. She had held a full-time job; she was definitely not a size five; and she’d had two past affairs that nobody troubled to deny. This was a far cry from the virginal teenage Princess of Wales; this was bordering on reality as Elizabeth knew it.
Elizabeth studied the details of the Yorks’ wedding for inspiration. She liked the Duchess’s wedding gown; its low-cut circular bodice was very flattering; just the thing for the full-figured bride. Elizabeth hoped she could find one of a similar design.
From a description of Sarah’s bridal bouquet, Elizabeth learned that a sprig of myrtle was traditionally included for brides. (Whatever for?) Consult the folklore book. Myrtle, the symbol of Venus, goddess of love. Can you get sprigs of myrtle in June in Georgia? Elizabeth wondered. That should be an exciting task for the florist. What else should she use in her bouquet? Thistles, of course, for Scotland, and maybe dogwood, the state flower of Virginia. Subject, of course, to whatever the florists could manage on such short notice. It’s a good thing I didn’t have more time, Elizabeth admitted to herself; I could have been a florist’s nightmare.
The one custom about a royal wedding that Elizabeth did not admire and envy was the use of small children as the members of the wedding party. “There is no way,” she said, frowning at the charming photos of princes in sailor suits and winsome four-year-olds in Victorian frocks. “They’d probably start pelting each other with hymnbooks.”
Not that the American custom of bridesmaids was much better. The bride was expected to choose her sister, her fiancé’s sister, and a few close friends or cousins as attendants, preferably the most presentable looking of her acquaintances, so as not to blight the wedding pictures. Ruefully, Elizabeth remembered her own summons to serve as bridesmaid for Cousin Eileen, whom she barely knew. She had hated the malarial yellow dress chosen for her. I’m as bad off as Eileen was, she thought. I don’t have anybody to ask. How thoughtless of Cameron and me not to have sisters. We’re all right on brothers: Ian and Bill, for best man and usher, and presumably Charles and Geoffrey can usher. But that presupposes having four woman attendants. Not possible.
It was at this moment of desperation that Elizabeth remembered a childhood vow made with her then-best friend Jenny Ramsay, when during an orgy of sentiment watching Pride and Prejudice they had promised to be bridesmaids in each other’s wedding. Elizabeth’s family had moved to Virginia when she was in the tenth grade, so she and Jenny had not experienced the caste system of high school together. Gradually they lost touch. She hadn’t heard from Jenny in years. Elizabeth seemed to recall that she had gone to college at Agnes Scott-or was it Meredith? She remembered Jenny as a perky, fun-loving blonde whose idols in life were Donny Osmond and, in her I Dream of Jeannie days, Barbara Eden. Assuming that Jenny had not fulfilled her youthful dream of residing in a bottle in the home of an astronaut, she was probably still somewhere in the vicinity of Chandler Grove. (Burger King, thought Elizabeth uncharitably, remembering Jenny’s grade-point average in junior high.)
When Elizabeth telephoned Aunt Amanda to ask about the whereabouts of Jenny Ramsay, she was surprised that her aunt recognized the name at once. She was even more surprised to learn that Jenny, far from sporting a paper hat and serving fast food, was part of the news team on the local television station. Elizabeth had written her a long chatty letter, summarizing a few years of achievements and adventures, and ended by telling her about the Queen’s garden party and asking Jenny to be her maid of honor. The reply arrived a few days later, on a cat notecard: Love to! Call me when you get back to C. Grove!
So that was settled. Jenny for maid of honor and Mary Clare from the anthropology department as a bridesmaid. (“Be sure you take notes during the ceremony!” Jake had urged her.)
Elizabeth, busy with her plans, sped past the mountain vistas of 1-77 and down into the pine forests of middle Carolina with hardly a glance at the scenery.
Geoffrey drew aside the curtain and gazed out at the winding gravel driveway. “I thought she’d be here by now, didn’t you?” he remarked to his brother Charles. “Of course, the trip probably takes longer with mice and pumpkin.”
“Pumpkin?” said Charles, whose inattention was evident. “What are you talking about?”
“It was a literary reference. Remember Cinderella? I was alluding to Cousin Elizabeth’s fondness for building castles in the air and then moving into them.”
Charles did not bother to reply, as this might be interpreted by Geoffrey as an inducement to stay. Charles had retreated to the musty depths of the Chandler library to commune with his thoughts, and he had enjoyed a quiet hour of brandy and contemplation in the leather chair next to the fireplace. The interruption by Geoffrey, who insisted upon pulling back the velvet curtains and peering out the window while making inane remarks, was most unwelcome. Charles had just completed some soul-searching and found to his chagrin that he had remarkably little area to cover. The depression resulting from this discovery had made the prospect of a visit with his adder-tongued brother even more painful than usual.
Geoffrey, blissfully unaware of the dread he inflicted, prattled on about the family’s current obsession. “I should be learning my lines for the play, of course, but I doubt that I shall get much chance with all the distractions to come. Still, I expect that I shall find Elizabeth’s royalty fantasies highly entertaining. Although, Lord knows, Southern brides are prone to it with less provocation than she has. Did you ever notice that?”
“What?” murmured Charles. He was holding his brandy snifter in both hands, as if he expected the spirits therein to offer the sort of career advice Macbeth had received.
“About Southern brides’ royalty fantasies,” said Geoffrey, warming to his topic. “A couple of weeks before the wedding, they all come down with a strange personality disorder. It’s characterized by delusions of grandeur, obsession with ritual, and a tendency toward ruthless tyranny.”