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his own concerns to pay any attention to Elizabeth or his other cousins. Then when she was eleven and Bill thirteen, their father had been transferred to a company office six states away, and the visits stopped altogether. Her mother’s family became voices calling long distance or gloves and bath powder at Christmas time. She doubted if she would even have been asked to participate in the wedding, except for the fact that Eileen had no close friends—at least, none that her mother was prepared to see in a formal wedding ceremony.
    Amanda’s seasonal letters to her sister’s family had been voluminous on the subjects of tomato plants and carpeting. She lavished great detail on her own occasional indispositions—her every headache was a migraine—but on the subject of Eileen’s illness she was consistently reticent. Therefore, Elizabeth knew very few of the details. Amanda mentioned it first as “Eileen’s sensitive nature,” or “bad dreams and other signs of a delicate temperament.” Just what symptoms were masked by these euphemisms the MacPhersons were not told. Finally Amanda announced in a letter that her daughter had been sent away to a “finishing school” that specialized in dealing with sensitive girls. The MacPhersons knew that Cherry Hill was a private and rather expensive mental institution, but they never betrayed this knowledge to Amanda, though Bill was fond of alluding to it in ambiguous jests.
    Eileen had been out of Cherry Hill for a year now, during which time she had been enrolled in the university as an art major, though she had produced no works except for small sketches assigned as class projects, which she did not bring home.
    Elizabeth wondered what her family felt about her engagement or her present health. Whatever she learned would not come from Amanda.

CHAPTER FOUR
    W HEN E LIZABETH REACHED the bottom of the staircase, the only person in sight was a pleasant-looking young man in a tennis outfit who was sitting in the library leafing through a copy of
Sports Illustrated
. He fit the description of Mr. Bryce’s new law partner, so Elizabeth concluded that he must have been summoned a day early. Aunt Amanda must be matchmaking in earnest, she thought. Still, he wasn’t bad-looking.
    “Hi!” she said, peering over the magazine. “Are you here for dinner?”
    “So they tell me,” he said. “But if Charles chose the menu, I may remember a pressing engagement. He’s into soybean casseroles.”
    “Dinner is destined to be strange no matter
what
we have,” Elizabeth retorted, taking the chair across from his.
“He’s
coming, too.” She nodded in the direction of the castle.
    “You mean Alban?” he asked.
    “Yes. I can’t wait to see what he’s like. He’ll probablycome clanking in wearing a saber and an iron cross from the Thirty Years War.”
    “Actually, they didn’t start giving out iron crosses until 1813,” he replied. “But it sounds like a very interesting sort of evening. What do you do?”
    “Well, if you mean ‘What do I do’ in the sense of: do I worship oak trees or think I’m Peter Pan, the answer is nothing. I’m Elizabeth MacPherson, from a sane branch of the family. I just finished college a few weeks ago, and I haven’t started job-hunting yet, so I guess the answer to what I do is still ‘nothing.’ ”
    “Enjoy it while you can,” he replied. “Because if I know Amanda, you won’t be doing nothing for long.”
    “I’ve been addressing invitations all afternoon,” Elizabeth said.
    “But the wedding is next Saturday. Surely it’s a little late to be mailing them!”
    “They’re afterthoughts.”
    “Friends of the bride,” her companion offered. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Well, if it gets too grim, you can always sneak off and amuse yourself. Do you play tennis?”
    “Yes, after a fashion,” Elizabeth answered. “I mean, you haven’t seen me at Wimbledon.”
    “Well, you’ll make a nice change