‘Come!’ the head seamstress said, holding out her hand to Lori and nodding imperatively. ‘You come!’
Taking her hand, Lori stepped off the stool. Clicks of the tongue, hisses and gestures from the little women, indicated that she should walk slowly, as the dress was bristling with pins. This was the first time that she was wearing the actual wedding dress; previously, as per couture tradition, Lori had had fittings for the
toile
, a test-run dress of heavy unbleached cotton, made so that the design and fit could be perfected for the seamstresses to reproduce in satin and lace.
Lori glided across the marble floor of the Green Drawing Room to the enormous, gilt-framed cheval mirror which had been wheeled in for the purposes of the fitting. She watched herself approaching, a long, slim white figure in heavy duchesse satin, a notoriously demanding fabric that only a perfect figure and equally skilled tailoring could carry off. Her bob-length blonde hair had been pinned up on the crown of her head with kirby grips as best she could manage, showing off the length of her neck; her blue eyes were wide with disbelief as she came to a halt, taking in her transformation from all-American girl to Herzoslovakian Queen-to-be.
The seamstresses flocked around her, sighing with appreciation, clapping their hands, the smiles almost splitting their old lined faces as they saw how well the dress moved and how regally Lori carried it off. The design had been kept very simple, it had been explained to her, in order to set off the extraordinary Herzoslovakian crown jewels which she would be wearing; it was a sheath of bias-cut satin which followed the lines of her slim figure in a way that would have been overly sexual if Lori’s body had not been so elegant, with its flat stomach, small breasts and narrow athletic hips. Priceless ivory antique lace was draped at the bodice in overlapping panels that formed a boat neck, skimming Lori’s collarbones, falling into cap sleeves that covered her shoulders. At the neckline was pinned a wide strip of exquisitely soft, silky ermine: more ermine would trim the sleeves and the hem of the long, curving train, an abundance of rich fur considered suitable for a winter wedding.
‘Too much!’ the dressmaker said, smiling still, squeezing Lori’s upper arms. ‘Too much! Like man!’
The other women giggled, nodding in agreement, as Lori realized that they meant her shoulder muscles and her biceps.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, smiling back. ‘I won’t flex my arms on the big day.’
Teasingly, she raised one arm a little, turned the palm to face the ceiling, and contracted her muscles; her bicep and tricep popped up impressively. The women shrieked, the dressmaker grabbed Lori’s arm and pushed it down again, shaking her head.
‘No! Not like man!’ she wailed, continuing in a stream of urgent Herzoslovakian, stabbing Lori’s tricep with a pointing finger, gesturing at the lace that now sheathed Lori’s magnificently square shoulders.
‘We make sleeve longer,’ the dressmaker said firmly to Lori. ‘To here.’ She stabbed halfway down Lori’s arm. ‘We not see arm like man.’
The main door of the Green Drawing Room suddenly swung open, a footman entering first and holding it for the Dowager Queen, who swept in with her usual light, swift gait. The seamstresses instantly fell into curtseys – not quick bobs of the head and hips, but full, halfway-to-the-ground obeisances, heads ducked, gazes to the emerald malachite and marble inlaid floor that, along with the matching fireplace, gave the room its name.
‘Oh, how magnificent!’ the Dowager exclaimed, tapping the tips of her fingers together to avoid doing anything as vulgar as actually clapping. ‘My dear, you look like you were born to be a queen!’
It had been a huge relief to Lori that her prospective mother-in-law was so enthusiastic about Joachim’s lightning-swift courtship of his fiancée. As the King had assured Lori, the Dowager had been utterly delighted at the news of the engagement, kissing her daughter-in-law-to-be again and again, pouring her tea and handing her the cup with her own hands, rather than instructing the footman to do it – a sign of very high esteem – and launching into a stream of enthusiastic plans for the future. She was already occupying the Dowager’s apartment at Schloss Hafenhoffer, so Lori mustn’t think that there would be any awkwardness; on the marriage, Lori would join Joachim in the Imperial Suite. She wouldn’t interfere in any way with any changes Lori wanted to make; it would be a positive
relief
to finally have a reigning queen, the Dowager was
much
too old now for all the state duties and had been nagging Joachim for a
decade
to get married and bring a bride to Herzoslovakia! But he had held out for the right girl, and now he’d found her. The Dowager
couldn’t
be happier.
Despite her self-deprecating comments, the Dowager Queen had barely passed sixty, and, thanks to careful maintenance and judicious nips, tucks and tweaks, she looked much younger than that. In her elegant Yves Saint Laurent crepe suit, her classic Ferragamo court shoes, and a wonderful multi-stranded pearl necklace at her throat – she always wore pearls, she had told Lori, as they were extremely flattering to the complexion – she was intimidatingly elegant. At this moment, in her couture wedding dress, Lori felt for the first time that she was on a par with the Dowager, and certainly the open appreciation in the older woman’s eyes spoke volumes about the success of the dress.
‘Wonderful!’ she exclaimed, nodding vigorously. ‘Absolutely wonderful! My dear Lori, you have an excellent figure. A very hard design to wear – satin makes women look fat
so
easily – but you are perfect!’
Behind the Dowager, two more footmen entered the room, each carrying a large, elaborately carved wooden box; she pointed with one ring-laden hand to the huge malachite table, and the footmen scurried to set down the boxes as instructed.
‘We must decide now on the tiara and parure you will wear,’ the Dowager said, producing a small key from the pocket of her jacket and unlocking the boxes.
With a superbly theatrical gesture, she flung one after the other open, and stepped back, revealing the contents, a small smile playing on her face as Lori and the seamstresses gasped in unison. It was immediately obvious why the boxes were so big: inside each, on moulded beds of dark burgundy velvet, sat a lavish tiara, surrounded by matching sets of jewellery. Both tiaras were so heavily crusted with pearls and diamonds that they looked, Lori thought in a rare, disloyal moment, more like something a drag queen or a gypsy bride would wear than an actual royal queen.
But then the Dowager lifted one up, easing it gently out of its case, and carried it over to Lori, who bent to allow her future mother-in-law to set it on her head. It felt as if it weighed ten pounds, the metal sides spiking down through her hair, pressing tight as a clamp. She thought suddenly of that medieval torture device she’d seen in a film, an iron ring that fitted round the skull and could be tightened, slowly and agonizingly, by screws on each side. Gingerly, she straightened up again, to even louder gasps: one of the seamstresses burst into loud, gulping tears, and the Dowager produced a tiny, lace-trimmed handkerchief from somewhere and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with it.
Lori felt like crying herself, to be honest. The tiara was perfect, breathtakingly so: the Dowager’s good taste was unerring. Lori didn’t even want to imagine the value of what she was wearing on her head: it was more like a crown, imposing and regal. Diamonds the size of quails’ eggs were fixed into the elaborate golden curlicues, pearls almost as large weaving around them in swirls that echoed the gold setting, rising to a central curve in which the largest diamond of all towered high above Lori’s temples.
‘Only you could wear this, Lori,’ the Dowager said with great fondness. ‘Your height, the lovely wide forehead . . . magnificent! It would dwarf a smaller woman. I could never – how do you say,
carry this off
? This tiara has not been worn for over a hundred years. Oh yes.’ She nodded in great satisfaction as she folded up the handkerchief and replaced it in her pocket. ‘It waited for you a long time.’
Lori was speechless. She stood, staring at herself, as the Dowager bustled back to the jewellery box, and returned with a pearl and diamond collar, the jewels set in a gold framework that matched the design of the tiara.
‘I instructed Dagmar to cut the neckline
so
,’ she said, nodding vigorously as she looked at the lace that followed the line of Lori’s collarbones. ‘It is excellent, Dagmar.’
The seamstress went bright red and swallowed hard.
‘Help me,’ the Dowager commanded, as they lifted and eased the collar to lie around Lori’s neck without damaging the delicate lace. It weighed almost as much as the tiara; Lori thought again, oddly, of torture devices. ‘See!’ the Dowager said happily. ‘The diamonds
en tremblant
! Perfect!’
She touched the diamonds that were suspended all around the base of the collar on minutely fine gold wires.
‘They move, a little, as you do,’ she explained to Lori. ‘They catch the light, like a fire around your neck. Beautiful! Dagmar, the earrings . . .’
The little seamstress was already holding out the matching earrings to the Dowager, who clipped them onto Lori’s lobes.
I’m like their doll
, Lori thought with amusement,
their giant, larger-than-life doll that they get to dress up .
. .
‘Such an Aryan beauty!’ the Dowager observed happily. ‘So blonde! And such lovely blue eyes, just like Joachim’s! You will have very beautiful fair babies.’
The seamstresses nodded vigorously as Lori braced herself not to flinch at the ice-cold metal tightly fastened to her scalp, bare neck and earlobes:
wow, these boxes must have come from deep in the vault. They do feel as if no one wore them in a hundred years.
As promised, Joachim had taken her to see the family jewels on their return to Schloss Hafenhoffer, but there had been so very much to view that it was impossible to take it all in. Some preliminary selections had been made, jewellery which Lori would wear for official engagements and State dinners, but he had suggested that she spend some days there, going through the collection with the help of the Dowager, familiarizing herself with what was at her disposal and considering what she might want to have reset, as many of the pieces were old-fashioned and could do with a more modern setting. Which would have been lovely, if Lori had had the faintest idea about jewellery settings.
‘Joachim was
very
blond when he was small, like his father,’ the Dowager was saying comfortably, ‘but then his hair became more dark. Mine, of course—’ she smiled as she touched her ash-blonde locks – ‘mine has a little help! But I have always been proud that my eyes are so light.’
Like a husky,
Lori thought, looking at the Dowager.
That pale, pale blue, like water over swimming pool tiles . . .
‘Aryan?’ she said hesitantly. ‘Isn’t that a bit—’
But the Dowager had already moved on to the subject of Lori’s bouquet and the flower arrangements in the cathedral.
‘White roses and
anemonen,
’ she was saying with great satisfaction. ‘Tied in lace sewn with pearls—’
She reached up to touch the heavy lace bodice of the dress. ‘Like this. It will be sewn with many, many seed pearls,’ she said to Lori. ‘Dagmar and the women will be very busy. Much work for them, very tiny stitches! But we are very proud of our sewing skills in Herzoslovakia. We will take you to Paris, of course, Lori, for the collections. But your dress must be designed and made here, as is the tradition. I, too, had my wedding dress made in Herzoslovakia, by Dagmar’s mother.’
Dagmar beamed and nodded vigorously.
‘Now, Dagmar,’ the Dowager continued, ‘the Queen-to-be has been standing still for a long time, and she must be tired. She is used to running and jumping, not being still! Take this off her. The next fitting is in three days, correct? I want to see at least a third of the pearls on the bodice by then. And loosen it fractionally at the bosom. Oh, and I think the sleeves should be a little longer—’
‘She’s already said that,’ Lori said, grinning. ‘To hide my big man arms.’
The Dowager smiled back. ‘You are very fit and healthy, my dear!’ she said tactfully. ‘That is a wonderful thing. But yes, a bride is not a . . .’ She shook her head, not finding the word in English.
‘Bodybuilder?’ Lori suggested.
‘Yes! Bodybuilder! What is good for the beach is not good for the church. Now, Dagmar will take this dress off you, very carefully, and you will meet me for tea in my rooms so that the florist can show us the sketches for the flowers. I want to make sure everything is
just
the way you want it . . . I will arrange everything, of course, but we must be sure that it is all how you would like . . .’
Really, I’d so much rather she just chose everything,
Lori thought ruefully as a footman led her along panelled corridors to what the Dowager called her rooms, but was actually an entire wing of the castle.
We’re doing this dance, her and me, like we’re in one of those balls from a Jane Austen movie – I want her to pick what’s best, she wants me to pick what I’d like, we’re pirouetting round and round in ever-decreasing circles . . . the trouble is, everything she suggests is so pretty and perfect and suits me so well, but if I just say I love it she gets worried I’m being too polite and starts picking holes in it . . . and if I make a suggestion it takes half an hour for her to explain to me that it sounds lovely but unfortunately there’s a very good reason why it won’t be possible .
. .
Which was exactly what proceeded to happen with the florist. It took two hours of negotiation over lapsang souchong and almond madeleines to assure the Dowager that the roses and anemones, the ribbons trimmed with seed pearls, the large arrangements in the cathedral – rose bushes carefully bedded into huge eighteenth-century
famille rose
Chinese porcelain jars – all sounded exquisite just as the Dowager and the florist had conceived them. The florist left, and Lori, shattered in a way she had never been in all her years of hardcore physical training, set down her teacup and prepared to go back to her own apartment for a much needed nap.