Chapter Seventy-Eight
“You did what?” Priscilla demanded.
Before the mirror, Thomas calmly continued knotting his black dinner tie. “I invited Mrs. Chastain, the milliner, to our daughter’s birthday party. I thought she’d like to see her artistry worn in person.”
“Thomas…” Priscilla positioned herself between her husband and the mirror. “Jacqueline Chastain is a nice enough person, but she is a milliner, a…a woman of trade.”
Thomas placed the back of his hand on his wife’s arm and gently but firmly moved her out of his line of vision. “So?”
“So? So people like her are not to be invited to Regina’s party! That’s what’s so!”
His task completed, Thomas leveled his gaze at his wife. “Now, how would you have felt if someone had said that about you as a doctor’s daughter—a saw-bones, some would say.”
Priscilla flushed. “Don’t you speak that way about my father, God rest his soul.”
“I’m not speaking of your father, but of you, Priscilla. Try to walk in the shoes you may have filled if you’d not married into the Toliver family.”
Priscilla’s eyes blazed. “And think of the children you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t married me,” she said.
“Believe me, Priscilla, I do every day. Rest easy, my sweet. From the look of Mrs. Chastain, she doesn’t eat much.”
While Thomas mingled among the guests, he looked for her entrance. A place had been set for Jacqueline Chastain at dinner as far away as was possible from his chair at the head of the table. Thomas was tempted to move her place card closer to him but realized that would invite speculation from his wife. What had gotten into him? He was entertaining dangerous ideas—or was he? Was it so wrong—immoral—to admire a beautiful woman not your wife? To enjoy the simple pleasure of her company? In the nineteen years of his marriage, he had never looked at another woman in—the way a man shouldn’t once he had taken a wife and had children by her. He couldn’t have explained the impulse that had caused him to invite Mrs. Chastain to his daughter’s party or his excitement at the prospect of seeing her again. He had spoken only a few words to her, spent only minutes in her company, but he couldn’t get her voice out of his head, her lovely face and pleasing manner out of his thoughts. He almost hoped she wouldn’t appear, and if she didn’t, there was no reason to think they would meet again.
Thomas concentrated on his daughter, laughing, glowing in a circle of her friends, Tyler McCord planted by her side. He sighed. The boy was a good catch. He was from a stable, loving family, and he was obviously head over heels in love with Regina, and she with him. Everyone in the Toliver household liked him, the boys especially. Tyler and Vernon could talk land, and he and David baseball, and the McCords already treated Regina like one of their own. As a father, Thomas could ask for no more than that. The burnished green satin headpiece set off his daughter’s waterfall of red ringlets dazzlingly. In the center of the band was a small diamond pin he and Priscilla had presented her in honor of her sixteenth birthday.
“Thank you, Mother and Daddy,” Regina had said in her effusively appreciative way when they’d opened presents earlier. (Vernon and David had remembered her with silk stockings and her grandmother with enameled hair clips.) “When I wear this pin I will always remember the wonderful party you gave me on my sixteenth birthday.”
Priscilla had taken the ornament to attach to Regina’s dress, but Thomas had stopped her by suggesting she pin it in the center of the headband. “Daddy! What a darling idea!” Regina had cried, and Thomas had ignored the speculative look Priscilla shot him while his idea was put in place.
How he wished Mrs. Chastain were here to see the display of her creation. Priscilla had told Regina that it had been designed just for her and bragged that no one else in town had anything like it. The newspaper pictures the photographer had taken of his daughter would not do it justice.
“Excuse me, Mr. Thomas,” Barnabas, Petunia’s husband and the Tolivers’ houseman, whispered into his ear. “The Mrs. Jacqueline Chastain you were expecting is at the door.” He handed Thomas her calling card.
Thomas’s heart jumped. “Well, then, by all means, let’s go collect her, Barnabas.”
She stood in the chandelier-lit, overfurnished foyer with a dignity meant to hide the uncertainty of her reception, Thomas perceived at once. He felt his ire rise. He would make sure no one gave her reason to feel unwelcome in his house. He walked toward her smiling and held out his hand. She wore a white dress that forswore the lavishly trimmed, bustled, tightly corseted gowns every woman in the party was wearing in favor of a loosely fitted creation that flowed from her shoulders—her own design, Thomas guessed, and admired her courage in swimming against the stream. Her dark hair was arranged in a coronet atop her head and entwined with yellow satin ribbons.
“Mrs. Chastain,” he said, taking her hand. “How good of you to come.”
“It is my pleasure, if slightly dampened by nervousness, Mr. Toliver,” Jacqueline said.
Thomas presented his arm. “I’ve just the thing to correct that, Mrs. Chastain. Let’s head for the punch table.”
Priscilla greeted their guest with her practiced hostess charm that did not bother to hide her pointed surprise the milliner had had the audacity to show up. “I so hope we haven’t put you out to come on such short notice, Mrs. Chastain. My husband can be…overly enthusiastic sometimes.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Toliver, and I admire enthusiasm. It is such a generous trait.”
When Thomas escorted the new arrival to meet his daughter, Regina threw her arms around her. “I love, love, love my hairpiece, Mrs. Chastain. Thank you so much for all the creativity and time and effort you put into it.”
“Seeing it worn in your hair makes the time and effort insignificant, Miss Toliver.”
“Oh, do please call me Regina, and may I call you Jacqueline? It’s such a beautiful name. French, isn’t it?”
Thomas could have hugged his daughter. When Jacqueline turned to meet Vernon and David, who’d been waved over for introductions, he drew Regina to his side and kissed her temple. “I love you, Poppy.”
“I love you, too, Daddy.”
When he introduced Jacqueline to his mother, Thomas caught the imperceptible quirk of a maternal eyebrow directed at him, in his youth a definite precursor of a talk to come. She put Jacqueline at ease immediately by complimenting her dress.
“I see you agree, as I do, with Oscar Wilde’s view that these ‘dress improvers’”—Jessica swiped at her bustle—“are a modern-day monstrosity. My friend Tippy—Isabel—is now designing dresses free of these abominations. Do you know of Isabel?”
“Indeed I do, Mrs. Toliver,” Jacqueline said, looking amazed. “You know Isabel? Personally?”
“I most certainly do.”
Elated, Thomas watched the two women put their heads together in an animated discussion of his mother’s history with Tippy. Before long, other guests gathered around, the wives admiring Jacqueline’s dress, the men admiring Jacqueline.
At the end of the evening, Thomas said, “How did you arrive, Mrs. Chastain?”
“By livery. I told the driver to return by ten.”
“Jackson is probably drunk in the local tavern by now. I will summon my driver and carriage to take you home.”
He would have preferred to go himself, but that would have tempted fate. He saw her out to the carriage and gave his driver explicit instructions not to leave until Mrs. Chastain was safely ensconced in her quarters above her shop. They shook hands. “Good-bye…Jacqueline. Thank you so much for coming.”
“You were kind to invite me…Thomas.”
She smiled at him, the moonlight glowing in the darkness of her hair, on the yellow satin ribbons. “Perhaps we will have the opportunity to meet again,” he said.
“I hardly think that’s likely, but the thought is nice. Good-bye…Mr. Toliver.”
Thomas watched the carriage pull away and swallowed the ache in his throat.