The brief, bright candle of her life was about to burn out, and I didn’t even know it. One winter’s day, when she was out playing in the snow with Mr. Roke-Green’s three daughters, a milk cow wandered past, dragging a frayed rope and crying to be milked, her angry pink udders swollen and swaying. Kate’s mind was instantly catapulted back in time, to that February day, so long ago, when we three sisters had our syllabub before our lives changed forever. Looking at her suitor’s three girls, she must have seen us. Perhaps she was driven to try to recapture the joy of that day, the last day when we were truly little girls, to remind herself of her youth and zest for life, to prove to herself that it was still there, that she could be that Kate again if she really tried. “A syllabub! We shall have a syllabub! A sweet, sweet syllabub!” my Kate impulsively cried, echoing her long ago girlhood self. I can see her now, in the black gown I had made with the row of buckram stiffened bows on the bodice, its skirt trailing listlessly, like a wilted black tail, behind her in the snow, and her hair, now faded to peaches and cream, either streaming free in a mass of wilted ringlets or braided into a coronet perched high atop her head, a coiffure made in mockery of the Crown she never coveted but had nonetheless cast such a giant shadow over her life.
