Read Online Jennie About to Be by Elisabeth Ogilvie - Free Book Online Page B

the dressmaker, milliner, mantua maker, and shoemaker.
    â€œI have so many new clothes already,” Jennie protested to Aunt Higham. “You’ve already outfitted me completely. I need only a wedding gown.”
    â€œFiddlesticks. You’ll be an officer’s wife now, a matron, not a girl. You must be dressed for the position. Has he said where the wedding trip is to be?”
    Could there conceivably be something they weren’t managing? Rather than admit that the wedding trip hadn’t been mentioned to her, she said, “He wants to surprise me.”
    Aunt Higham snorted. “There’ll be surprises enough without that one.”
    She appreciated not having to prepare Jennie for the events of the marriage bed, though she pretended to be shocked when Jennie told her she knew. Then she dropped the pretense. “I dread telling my own girls,” she admitted. “I don’t know what Charlotte thinks marriage is and where she came from. You and I were lucky to be country lasses.”
    Privately Lady Geoffrey gave Jennie some of the jewelry given her by Nigel’s father. Officially her gift to the couple was Jennie’s portrait, to join the other Gilchrist brides in the gallery at Linnmore House. She wasn’t up on the fashions in painters, she said, but Bamber Raleigh knew a friend who was anxious to secure commissions for his godson. Jennie and Nigel were not knowledgeable either, but they looked at the painter’s work and liked it, so the portrait was begun.
    Now fittings were interspersed with sittings. Nigel attended when he could; otherwise the children’s French governess went with her to the studio. She wore the bronze-colored riding habit, but it was agreed that she could hold the hat in her hand.
    â€œYou have a good head,” the artist told her, “and it’s natural for you to have it uncovered, as if you are a free spirit which needs to have wild, clean spaces in which to exist. . . . That hat is the silliest bit of frippery I ever saw, by the way.”
    He was the first artist she had ever known, a fat, untidy young man who talked easily with her as he worked. He was both unpretentious and unselfconscious. He asked her where in the north she had grown up, and what she told him inspired the background for the figure.
    Of her two chaperones she preferred Mademoiselle, who did fine needlework from which she never lifted her eyes, and seemed occupied by her own thoughts. Jennie and the painter rambled on as if she weren’t there. When Nigel came, he ranged uneasily about the studio like a restless horse in a box stall, or else he sat and stared unnervingly first at the artist and then at Jennie. At these times the artist didn’t talk but whistled all the time under his breath as he worked, and Jennie was so overwrought by Nigel’s proximity that she was given to sudden nervous starts and changes of color and temperature.
    When it was just herself, the artist, and the Frenchwoman, the studio sessions were the most restful hours of that febrile time of preparation. Nigel and his mother approved the finished work; she was pleased with it and even more pleased when the artist told her she was the best subject he’d had so far.
    â€œI believe you’ve brought me luck,” he said. “I hope I’ve done the same for you.”
    â€œI’ll bring my children to you to paint,” she promised, laughing. Who needed luck when they had Nigel? “But then you’ll be painting Royalty and won’t have time for us.”
    â€œDon’t be too sure of that,” he warned her. “Just remember your promise.”
    Ianthe sent her a lace veil from Switzerland. Sylvia couldn’t make the long journey from the north because she was pregnant again, but Sophie came in care of a London lady who was returning home after spending Easter at a house near Pippin Grange. Sophie’s gift was a pair of shellwork pictures