The Mirror Read Online Free PDF Page A

schoolmarm? Even if your father had allowed you to enter the university, you'd have had to marry sometime. You will come to love Mr. Strock with the years." But Sophie McCabe didn't sound all that convinced.

    "Please?" Shay stood before the wedding mirror, tightly corseted, feet aching in tiny button shoes, Brandy's body too warm in the white gown spread over scratchy, starched slips.
    Sophie'd brushed Brandy's hair till it crackled, and piled it high in a configuration Shay would never be able to duplicate. Then Sophie'd read aloud from the Bible.
    Was Marek, in a future time, waiting for a bride who wouldn't show? "What's happened to my body?" she asked the mirror.
    Is this what happens when you die? Did I die last night and become reincarnated or something? Backwards? This house had always been in the family. McCabe was a family name. Brandy had to be an ancestress.
    What if she refused to go downstairs and wed someone else's bridegroom? John McCabe would heat me, that's what. And then he'd probably drag me downstairs anyway. There was no similarity between Brandy's formidable father and the gentle Jerrold Garrett.
    Elton peered around the door. "Are you alone?" He slipped in, tall and handsome in his white suit. "Pa'll be here soon. You look beautiful but you shouldn't cry. Makes your face red." He wiped tears from her cheeks with his handkerchief. "It won't be so bad. But if Strock don't treat you decently, send word to me in secret. You know I'll do what I can for you, Bran." He squeezed her hand and left as quickly as he'd come.
    Bran? Shay stared into the mirror. She tried to remember the face in the darkened wedding portrait that hung in the hall until . . . until the world had turned upside down. But it had been so lifeless, posed. Yes, there was a similarity.
    Shay'd always heard her grandmother referred to as Bran, or Grandma Bran . . . Short for Brandy. Oh, God.
    The veil had been her grandmother's. Rachael'd worn it too. She wished she'd listened to some of her mother's stories on the family's past. But they'd been so many, and so boring.
    Footsteps on the stairs.
    "Do something, please! Let me go back before it's too late." Shay pummeled the wedding mirror.

    5

    Shay descended the curving stairs on John McCabe's arm, in Grandma Bran's veil and Grandma Bran's body. Tears had given way to panic, panic to zero-hour logic. When the moment came to say "I do," she said, "I don't."
    No buffet, no pink-and-red posies, no guests.
    She hesitated at the archway to the living room and John yanked her forward. Sophie'd changed her dress. She stood talking to Elton and two strange men.
    One of the men towered over even Elton, but Shay remembered Brandy's body was considerably shorter than her own. That's why the rooms seemed larger, the doorways higher.
    Through the veil, Shay recognized the bay windows, the wooden platform rocker, the fireplace.
    John McCabe handed her to the tall man in a black suit, a funny tie, a shiny black vest showing in pieces above the coat and below the white shirt . . . and the most unwelcoming eyes a groom ever turned on a bride.
    Shay forced Brandy's throat to swallow. I can't marry my own grandfather.
    The man beside her listened intently as the other man read from a book.
    Shay concentrated on not throwing up, remembering to say she didn't when she was supposed to "do." It would be easier without guests.
    "And do you, Corbin Strock . . ."
    "Corbin!" Shay stared at the groom. That was what her grandmother'd said just before . . .
    The minister cleared his throat and began again, "And do you . . ."
    Shay swayed on Corbin Strock's arm and practically strangled the small bouquet in her other hand. A far-off buzzing in her ears.
    "And do you, Brandy Harriet McCabe, take this man.. . ."
    It was coming. The time to refuse. Shay cleared Brandy's throat, took a deep breath.
    ". . . promise to obey . . ."
    Her heart drowned out his voice. The bay windows behind him slipped out of focus.
    ". . . until