Magical Weddings (35 page)

It didn’t help that the perfectly fine coffee that she had once purchased every day on her way to work, now tasted so bland she had stopped buying it. Or that she couldn’t stop in at Matt’s Atlas for the coffee she now preferred, in case she bumped into him.

“So much for him being all: I’m not running away from this,” her caffeine-deprived brain complained. She had told herself over and over again that walking away from exploring what might be between them was safer in the long run, even if she did now feel like the biggest coward ever. But while she had walked away, Matthew had not even chased after her. In fact, he hadn’t contacted her at all since she had walked out of the pub.

Cait rummaged in her bag for the keys that would unlock the room assigned to her for the exhibition. All she could hope for today was that work, along with the peace and quiet, would soothe her frayed nerves.

Five o’clock would be soon enough to be worrying about how she and Matthew would be with each other tomorrow at the wedding. Right now she had to make sure the sight-lines in the exhibition were clear and then walk the room with the audio-guide to check the evolution of lacemaking was relayed in the correct chronological order.

Resolved again to push Matthew out of her mind, she unlocked the door, stepped inside and got the shock of her life.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered, blinking a couple times to make certain that what she was seeing wasn’t an illusion.

Was this ‘prank the museum worker week’ and she had missed the memo?

Because somebody had been inside this room since she had locked it the night before.

Bolts of lace she had brought in to drape over the dressmaker’s dummies as a way of testing she had the lighting at a safe angle before using the real pieces, had been unravelled from where she had neatly stowed them, and now hung from the lighting rig in romantic panels that fluttered on the slightest breeze.

At the far end of the room there was a newly constructed lace bower.

The scent of roses filled the air, causing a wave of dizziness to wash over her.

Cait closed her eyes, and as she inhaled the scent, she saw the Matthew from her dreams holding a vintage white tea rose in his hand.

The memory was so vivid, it scared her, and she snapped open her eyes.

Something seemed to flutter just past her line of sight and intrigued she moved trance-like towards the lace bower made up of hundreds of lace miniature rosebuds.

As she passed through the archway the scent of roses intensified and Cait realised she had stumbled upon a stage set for a wedding.

It was clever, she thought, wonderfully clever.

She hadn’t considered creating a wedding scene to show how Queen Victoria had started the trend for white wedding dresses the moment she had favoured cream satin with hand-made lace stitched upon it, over the traditional royal silver for her gown.

Before then, women tended to get married in bright colours, or whichever their best gown was.

Except…

Cait thought immediately of the sketch of the Caterina Rosso lace dress. Without thinking, she pushed aside a lace panel and right in front of her, as if she had conjured it direct from her memory, was the bodice of Caterina Rosso’s lace dress, fitted to a dressmaker’s dummy.

Cait recognised immediately the intricate point de neige lacework that resembled snowflake crystals.

Utterly enchanted and with trembling hands she reached into her pocket for a pair of museum-issue linen gloves.

Her heart was pounding so hard with excitement she worried it was going to burst right out of her.

Could she truly be seeing—touching—a dress bodice made from four hundred year old lace, so sparklingly pristine, it looked like it had been made yesterday?

Maybe she was having some sort of breakdown.

Because, seriously, how could Caterina Rosso’s design be sitting on a dressmaker’s dummy in her exhibition room?

She shook her head to try and clear the heady floral scent wrapping itself around her, turning everything fuggy.

As the scent dissipated she half-expected the room to return to normal, but as she swung her gaze to the huge mirror in front of her, she could clearly see her reflection and the reflection of her hand touching the lace bodice.

She ran a fingertip down the wispy-soft sleeve of the dress, down to its pointed cuff.

It was real.

Turning, she hurried back to one of the glass cabinets at the main entrance to the room. She was certain she would find the small sample of Caterina Rosso’s lace that she had personally logged and mounted for display.

She peered into the cabinet and the breath rushed out of her lungs, fogging the glass a little.

Inside the display case, the shelf was empty.

“It’s not possible,” she whispered and slowly, she turned her head back to stare at the dressmaker’s dummy.

What she was thinking was completely ridiculous.

No way could a sample of lace fashion itself into the bodice of a dress.

Not unless you believed in magic.

****

Cait locked the exhibition room door behind her and hurried down the corridor. Climbing the stairs two at a time, she made a beeline for her office.

She would log on to her computer and check the museum’s inventory system. Probably the Museum of Lace in Venice had sent an additional piece. A modern copy of the bodice to demonstrate what the dress would have looked like. Another member of staff must have taken delivery of it yesterday, logged it, and set it up for display, knowing how busy she was.

But when she finally got onto the system, not only could she find no record of the lace bodice being catalogued, she could see from the records that nothing had been registered on the system at all yesterday.

Panic came and suffocated.

There was no way she could display the lace bodice without its provenance clearly listed beside it and away from the exhibition room it was even easier to dismiss the missing sample as somehow magically transforming itself into the bodice of the dress.

But then, where was the piece of lace? She could not have imagined personally pleading for it to be shipped and then cataloguing it into the museum.

Could she?

Cait suddenly couldn’t seem to hold onto a breath long enough to form thought.

Each inhale felt too shallow, each exhale too fast.

She could not have lost a key piece of the exhibit.

She would lose her job, her career—everything she had worked so hard for, for so long.

Stabbing at keys on the computer she entered the code she knew off by heart for the Caterina Rosso sample of lace and then sat back. When her query returned zero results her fingers flew to her mouth to stifle her cry of denial.

There had to be a mistake.

Reaching blindly for one of the glossy brochures she had had printed, she turned to the page she knew the text about Caterina Rosso should be.

Nothing.

Tossing the brochure aside she reached for another one and when the text flowed with no mention of the lacemaker, she flung that one aside as well.

She was going mad.

There was no other explanation.

Truly scared now she reached for her phone, brought up the diary function and searched for the meeting she had had with the Museum Director to discuss more funding to get the Caterina Rosso piece.

There was no entry.

She hopped up from her chair and started pacing.

It was as if she had imagined everything connected to getting the sample of lace for the exhibition.

Bending at the hip to try and ease the band of panic squeezing her chest, she knew she needed a plan if she was going to survive this day.

She would go down to the exhibition room where she would either a) find the room exactly as she had left it yesterday and worry about the breakdown she was having after the exhibition opened, or b) calmly remove the bodice and the bower, restore the room to how she had originally planned it, and search every square inch of the room for the missing sample of Caterina Rosso lace.

Back in the exhibition room everything was as she had left it, with one startling exception…

Now the bodice of the dress had a skirt attached.

This time Cait removed her gloves before reaching out to check it was real.

Shaking her head in wonder, she realised all that was needed for the gown to be a carbon copy of the Caterina Rosso dress was acres of lace train.

Part of Cait, the tiny part that wanted so desperately to believe there was magic at play, rebelled against finding a plausible explanation.

Would it hurt anyone, if she simply enjoyed the romance of the dress she had daydreamed about for months, coming to life?

On the other hand, if she was having some sort of stress-related episode, then surely she should call on her best friend for help? With shaking hands, she pulled her phone out of her bag, and uncaring about how early it was in the morning, phoned Rosie.

“Rosie?” Thank God, she thought when Rosie picked the phone up on its first ring.

“Cait, I was about to phone you.”

Dismissing the reason why, and with a definite tremble in her voice, Cait said, “Tell me you remember me showing you the Caterina Rosso sketch in the pub.”

“Of course I do.”

Cait’s legs gave out as relief rushed in. Sinking ungracefully to the floor she pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose to try and stem the tears. See? Everything would be all right. She wasn’t going insane.

“Is this about my dress?” Rosie asked, “Because I have to tell you that right now I have bigger problems.”

All Cait really heard was the whooshing sound of panic receding. No way could she have imagined Caterina Rosso if her best friend remembered seeing the sketch.

“So you definitely remember me going on about her and how I had to get a sample of her work for the exhibition?” she checked, ignoring Rosie’s attempt to divert the conversation away from Caterina Rosso.

“I definitely remember you going on about her and how she designed that dress and how amazing she was and how ahead of her time. Not sure I remember you getting a special piece for your exhibition. But listen, Cait I really need to talk to you-,”

Tears clogged her eyelashes.

She was just tired.

That was all it was.

Over-tired, completely stressed out and probably suffering from caffeine withdrawal.       Plus, she had really freaked herself out not being able to stop thinking about Matthew.   

Slowly, she stood back up to walk over to the dress.

If there really was no record of the Caterina Rosso piece of lace, all she had to do was remove the dress from the exhibition, reset the room, and make sure the audio-guide and brochure matched. Everything else could be figured out after she got some rest.

“…figured you might know of somewhere—
anywhere
we can have the reception?”

Cait frowned and pressed the phone tighter to her ear. “What was that?” she asked, listening super-carefully now.

“Honestly, Cait,” Rosie rebuked and started recapping, getting more and more stressed with each word. “Reception. Flooded. Wedding. Tits-up. Me, seriously about to lose it!”

“Oh my God, did you just say your reception venue has flooded?”

“Yep,” Rosie confirmed.

“But that’s-,”

“I know,” Rosie finished.

“Well, for goodness sake,” Cait said, stroking the dress as if it would somehow magically calm her down.

“Now you’re getting it. First Guy’s father, then my dress, now nowhere to host the wedding reception… It’s a sign. They’ve all been signs,” Rosie said, dejectedly. “I ended up telling Guy that and we had a major row and he’s stormed out. Probably gone to see Matthew and moan about how instead of coming up with solutions, all I want to do is cry and now I feel like giving up and cancelling the church tomorrow, too.”

“Don’t you dare,” Cait said, feeling a spark of energy shoot up her arm from her too-tight grip on the dress.

She thought about all the research she had done on Caterina Rosso. How the lacemaker had thought she had been born into the world too soon—that what she wanted to do with lace hardly seemed possible, and that in order to design and create she had to learn that she would only succeed by refusing to let life stifle her creativity or stamp out her hope.

Cait stared at the dress. Rosie and Guy’s wedding had to be the reason it had appeared.

“Guy is right,” Cait told Rosie, “No way are any of us giving up hope on you both getting married tomorrow. This is a hiccup, that’s all. We can totally fix it.”

“We can?” Rosie asked, with a sniff.

Cait felt a complete sense of calmness wash over her. “I have an idea. I’ll phone you back.”

“Wait, who are you going to phone? I’ve already tried seven places.”

“I’ll check the Assembly Rooms, first.”

“Oh, Cait,” Rosie sounded on the verge of more tears. “The Ball Room there was our number one venue, but when I checked with them last year, they didn’t have this weekend free.”

Cait closed her eyes and saw the ballroom she had been in, in her dreams, and far from being spooked, Cait felt an incredible sense of hope fill her with energy. “Well, I haven’t seen anyone setting up for a function this weekend,” she told Rosie, “Let me check it out for you, okay? If it’s a no-go, we’ll find somewhere else.”

“Did I tell you you’re the best friend ever?”

“Tell me when I’ve secured you somewhere to party tomorrow.”

“’Kay. Maybe I’ll phone Guy and sort things out there. That way there’ll be three of us phoning around if we need to.”

Twenty minutes later Rosie was screaming excitedly in her ear as Cait told her about the cancellation and how they were now having their wedding reception in the Assembly Rooms Ballroom. It was theirs to start decorating as soon as they went in with a deposit, but if they stopped in to see her first, she had bolts of spare lace they could use for decorating the tables with.

“Oh, and Rosie?” Cait’s gaze never left the dress as a huge smile broke out over her face. “I have a present for you for tomorrow. A special gift. I’ll give it to you when you stop in for the lace.”