Free The Windsor Knot by Sharyn McCrumb

to the right and scoot across the South Carolina hills to pick up Highway 441 in Georgia. There, a succession of increasingly smaller country lanes led at last to Long Meadow Farm. The whole trip took about six hours, during which time Elizabeth planned to reflect further on her organization schemes for the wedding.
    I expect I’m being very silly
, thought Elizabeth.
Probably some sort of genetic madness left over from the days when it
mattered
whether you got married or not But it’s
my
wedding, so whose business is it how manic I get?
    She had spent the past few days devouring volumes on wedding etiquette, wedding folk customs, and royal weddings, soaking up the details as if she were going to be tested on the material. Now she was almost as much of an authority on the subjectas Aunt Amanda. “And probably equally tiresome,” she said aloud. Elizabeth had no illusions about the glamour of romance; for nonroyal brides the fascination with matrimonial trivia did
not
extend beyond the bride’s most immediate circle. (This did not include the groom.) But she thought that perhaps women made a great ceremonial event out of a wedding in hopes that they would have to do it only once in their lives.
    The volumes on royal weddings fascinated Elizabeth. She decided that she would not borrow any ideas from the weddings of Princess Margaret or Princess Anne, because their marriages had not worked out. “Of course I’m being superstitious about it!” she told Jake Adair. “If you’re not superstitious, why get married at all?” To which Jake suggested that she go down the hall to cultural anthropology and give herself up as a research specimen.
    Elizabeth had begun her wedding research by reading a good deal about the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. She was delighted to learn that her wedding date, July first, was also the birthday of Princess Diana, but she soon found that reading about the wedding was depressing in more ways than one. First of all, nobody’s wedding could bear comparison to that of the Prince of Wales, and in contrast it made even the most ambitious of efforts seem shoddy. What was Aunt Amanda’s oak-paneled drawing room compared to the splendor of St. Paul’s? And who cared whether your invitations were engraved or not, if
theirs
had been issued by the lord chamberlain on behalf of the Queen?
    Once Elizabeth had got so caught up in her nuptial fantasies that she remarked aloud to Jake,“Would I love to get married in St. Paul’s Cathedral!”
    Jake looked up from his Tony Hillerman novel and said, “Why? You don’t know anybody in Minnesota, do you?”
    But there were drawbacks to the royal wedding that Elizabeth would not have to contend with. She comforted herself with those thoughts. No need of security guards. No government interference, forcing you to slight friends and distant relations in favor of foreign dignitaries. And nobody making the decisions for you about the reception food, the honeymoon, and all the other delightful details of planning the event.
Face it
, she told herself,
Diana had very little say-so in that wedding
.
    Which brought her to the other depressing fact she had gleaned from her reading: by American standards the Princess of Wales was not even a high-school graduate.
“That
puts my Ph.D. in perspective,” Elizabeth had remarked. She would gladly give Diana any number of IQ points if she could also transfer to the princess a pound of weight per point.
    Why couldn’t I be dumb and thin?
she asked herself. Clearly, Princess Diana did not bear thinking about.
    Thank God for Fergie.
    The other royal wedding, that of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, had been much more to Elizabeth’s liking. Elizabeth couldn’t even daydream herself into the role of a svelte blonde ice princess marrying the heir apparent, but the plump and clever Duchess of York was a bride that she could identify with. She read the hastily published biographies of the newlyweds with