Isobel's Wedding [antikvár]

Chapter 1 The Wedding (Francisco Goya, 1791) Iwas trying on the wedding dress when Tim phoned. Actuaily I was twirling around in front of the fulllength wall mirror, admiring the way the skirt billowed around me in a carefree puff of white chiffon, when I heard the phone ring. It had taken me longer to make this wedding dress than any other I'd ever done, but this was my dress. This was the dress I'd wear when I married Tim in two weeks' time and it had deserved all of my time and all of my attention. I smoothed the skirt and fingered the tiny white pearls neatly hand-sewn onto the bodice. There were four hundred and twenty of them. I'd never sew a pearl onto a dress again. Tsobel! It's for you!' Alison stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled at me. 'It's your fiancé.' She broke into a guffaw at the word 'fiancé'. She always did. Alison, who was twenty-one, thought I was out of my mind to be getting married. Alison didn't approve of marriage; she believed that husbands only tied you down, limited your potential, trapped you for the rest of your life. She thought I was too young to tie myself down to one person. But I wasn't. I was exactly the right age. Twenty-seven. Long enough on my own to