Chapter Thirteen
1896
The Phantom Bride
The journey took more than a month, and it was both comfortable and uncomfortable, right and wrong, tense and lovely.
In Washington, we posed as brother and sister, assigned to separate rooms in a travelers’ house, seated together only at dinner. Quietly, when no one else could hear, we told each other our stories. He’d cared for his three younger brothers after his mother had died in childbirth with the youngest one, and his father didn’t care if anyone was happy or sad or in pain or hungry as long as they kept themselves quiet. He’d lived in North Carolina all his life and taken many jobs to make money, but when he found his talent for tending growing things, Mr. Vanderbilt had actually found him by reputation and asked him to come to Biltmore. He’d been at Biltmore for a year when the great landscape architect Mr. Olmsted, who had designed the grounds, had come to survey his handiwork and was so impressed he praised him and shook his hand.
That was the day Clyde had decided to leave Biltmore and go to New York. Mr. Olmsted was working on a project there, a great park, and could certainly use one more pair of talented hands. Clyde would have followed him immediately, but he feared running out of money more than anything else on earth. Growing up so poor had taught him what it meant to decide which brother would go hungry on a given day, and he could never live that close to the bone again. He couldn’t let it happen. Not to his family, should he ever chance to have one, and in the meantime, not to him. He stayed at Biltmore another year to set aside some savings, and the rest I knew.
When he asked for my story in return, I told him almost everything. My invisible father, my early childhood in my grandparents’ house, my mother’s marriage, life on the farm in Tennessee. Why I danced. How I’d come to the Biltmore for work. I left out any mention of Ray. It thrilled me to realize I could pretend Ray never existed and no one would be the wiser. So from that day forward, I never spoke of him out loud to anyone.
When Clyde and I left Washington, we agreed to walk to Baltimore to stay with his mother’s family, hoarding our meager funds. Our sole topic while walking was pure mathematics: how could we stretch our pennies to feed ourselves each day for the absolute minimum? If we slept on the ground every night, would we have enough money for steamship passage up the coast? We haggled over nickels, cents, even half cents. The weather remained muggy and hot even as the sun began to set, and our bags, sparse as they were, grew heavy. When we came across a grand old pine as big around as the Biltmore’s greenhouse, we agreed to spend the night under its low, sheltering branches. During this pause, we finally broached the subject that had been simmering under all our conversations, so far unspoken.
He knelt carefully and unrolled a blanket on the ground under the side of the tree that was farthest from the road. I joined him on the blanket, but at the far edge. As the sun set the rest of the way and darkness descended around us, I felt smothered in layers of dust and grime, which I could do nothing to scrub off. Instead I reached up to unbraid and rebraid my hair slowly and with great care.
We didn’t speak, but even in the blackness, I could hear his breath and sense his nearness. When I was almost done with my braid, I could tell he had made his way halfway across the blanket, then closer and closer yet. I set one hand on the blanket to steady myself, and he found it with his own hand. I knew what he would do next, and I neither scooted away to make it harder nor leaned in to make it easier. I felt his other hand reach out for me. He lightly stroked the line of my jaw and brought my face to his for a kiss. The kiss was sweet and soft, a tender reminder, and it was hard for me to break contact. But I did.
“I’m not certain we should start that again,” I said.
“Why did we ever stop?”
“I didn’t know if I could trust you,” I said and realized I meant it. “I didn’t know your intentions.”
“My intentions were that we enjoy each other’s company.”
“And?”
“I like how kissing you and touching you feels,” he said, his voice a soft deep rumble in the darkness. “I can tell you like it too. Isn’t that enough?”
In the darkness, unable to see each other’s faces or bodies, we had only our words to do all the work for us. I let my silence speak for me.
He said then, “Maybe it’s not enough, I suppose, for a girl like you. But I can’t make any pledges.”
“I never asked for that.”
“I’m eighteen years old,” he said. “I need to make my name, build my career, before I’m fit to make any promises for a future together.”
“I didn’t ask for a future.”
“But don’t you want to take some pleasure in the present?” he asked.
I answered honestly. Maybe I shouldn’t have. “I don’t know.”
“Look, Ada,” he said, reaching for my hand again, entwining his fingers with mine. I let him. “You’re a charming and wonderful girl.”
“Flatterer.”
“I mean it. I enjoy your company. Very much. Why did you agree to come with me, if you don’t enjoy mine?”
I was glad I could tell part of the truth. “I do enjoy you. I do. But I agreed to come with you because it’s the fastest way to get where I need to be. Not to snatch some thrills along the roadside.”
He chuckled quietly. “At least you agree that I’m thrilling.”
I laughed at his confidence.
He went on, “I hold you in very high esteem and I would never hurt you. You can count on that.”
“Can I?” But his answer had charmed me, and the question was gentle, not pointed.
“I can at least say this,” he said. “I’ll never keep my sentiments a secret.”
Those words sprung immediately to my mind three nights later in Baltimore, where he sank to his knee in front of his mother’s cousins and asked me for my hand in marriage.
We had all gathered in the parlor after the evening meal, under the pretext that we’d be listening to one of the young ladies practice a new song on the piano. I walked toward the sofa but was ushered toward the room’s finest and most well-padded chair instead, a place of honor usually reserved for the hostess, and I should have known then that there was a reason. Instead I took my seat, as did the others, and I was still watching the empty piano bench and waiting for our songstress to begin when Clyde Garber placed a small decorative pillow on the ground in front of me with great deliberation.
Once he had settled his knee on the pillow and taken my hand in both of his, he swallowed twice and squared his shoulders. Then he said, in a voice that trembled just a little, “Miss Bates, it would make me the happiest man in the world if you would do me the honor of becoming my wife.”
It was almost like falling from the hayloft again, with my breath crushed out of my body, only instead of exploding with pain, I exploded with joy. He wanted me. He was offering me his whole self, for the rest of our lives. All he wanted in return was my whole self. I gave it.
Looking up at me with those blue eyes, his hands clutching my hand, sincerity plain on his face, he was utterly irresistible. I didn’t even hesitate.
“Yes! I’ll marry you,” I said.
The cousins broke out into applause, and he got to his feet and chastely kissed my cheek.
“I’m sorry there’s no ring,” he said.
“I don’t need a ring.”
“Nonsense,” piped up the eldest cousin. “You’ll borrow mine.” She slid a worn gold ring off her own finger and handed it to my new fiancé, and he slid it onto the fourth finger of my left hand, and tears sprang to my eyes.