When the Splendor Falls Read Free Page B

flanked the entrance and overlooked the covered veranda, the slender posts marching along the front thickly entwined with rambler roses much to Beatrice Amelia’s satisfaction.
    It was in the shade of the veranda that part of the Travers family now sat in companionable relaxation and casual conversation, the gentlemen enjoying their cooling mint juleps, while the ladies indulged in a pitcher of sweet lemonade and lace cookies. It was a moment of peace before the week’s busy preparations for the celebrations that were to begin on Friday with the sixteenth birthday party for Blythe Lucinda, youngest of the Travers. Althea Louise and her husband, Nathan, and their only daughter, six-year-old Noelle, had driven over from Royal Bay that morning in order to spend Sunday with her family. They had arrived two days earlier from Richmond, where Nathan had a law practice and just this past year had been elected to represent his home district in the state legislature. They planned to spend the week visiting between Travers Hill and Royal Bay, dividing their time equally between the two families—the Braedons especially anxious to spend time with their only granddaughter.
    On the morrow, Stuart James, the eldest Travers son, and his wife, Thisbe, and their two children, Leslie and Cynthia, were due from Willow Creek Landing, the family’s plantation south of Richmond, and fronting the James River. Unless, of course, they stayed over in Richmond and accompanied Maribel Samuelson and her party on Tuesday. That was when Maribel, Stuart Travers’s sister, and her husband, J. Kirkfield, were supposed to leave Richmond for Travers Hill. Family and friends were expected any day from Charleston and Savannah, and the friends and neighbors from Charlottesville and the surrounding county would start arriving during the latter part of the week; and half of those coming on Saturday just for the horse auction, followed by the race on Sunday.
    And sometime midweek, Palmer William, the youngest Travers son, was due home, and he might have half his class from school accompanying him as he had at Christmastime, much to his speechless mother’s dismay. And the Traverses’ in-laws from Royal Bay, especially Euphemia, Nathan’s mother, who was also Maribel’s best friend from childhood, were likely to be dropping in and out all week. Euphemia always had a special recipe she wanted to share. All of these thoughts and far more disturbing ones—concerning the menus for each meal, the dresses and gowns that should have been laundered by now and hadn’t, where everyone would be put up for the week, and who was talking to whom and should or shouldn’t be seated next to each other in the seating arrangements, and had Stephen polished all the silver—were racing through the mistress of Travers Hill’s mind and belying the outwardly serene expression on her face as she tended to her sewing.
    Beatrice Amelia was very carefully stitching a delicate pink rose on one of her fine lawn handkerchiefs, which she intended to tuck inside the lace-edged sleeve of her favorite rose pink foulard gown on Wednesday. Her pale blond head with its heavy, netted chignon was bent low over her embroidery as she examined her workmanship with a critical eye.
    Mother of eight children, the eldest twenty-six, the youngest fifteen, with only two not having survived infancy, Beatrice Amelia still retained much of the beauty that had made her a famous belle of Charleston in the thirties. Her flawless profile had been the inspiration for many an artist when creating a likeness to grace a cameo, and many of her dearest friends claimed Beatrice Amelia could still wear her first ball gown if she so chose; although, privately, each thought she must have let out the waist at least an inch or two, surely?
    “When is your cousin supposed to arrive, Nathan?” Stuart Travers, master of Travers Hill, asked, accepting another mint julep from the tray being proffered by the majordomo. “Ah,