Improbable Eden by Mary Daheim

you prefer horn or wood?”
    Eden was aghast. “Horn or wood? Am I being dressed or constructed?”
    The dressmaker exchanged knowing little smirks with Vrouw de Koch. “Both,” the Frenchwoman replied. “ Alors !”
    Eden’s lack of enthusiasm did nothing to stem the tide of pins and bastings. But the afternoon’s ordeal didn’t end with the fittings. Eden still had to face Master Cloudsley Clavell, a hairdresser whose pointed features reminded Eden of a ferret.
    â€œ Gorgeous, marvelous, eminently opulent hair!” Master Clavell enthused, tugging Eden’s tresses this way and that. “The opulence, oh, the opulence!”
    â€œ It’s all my own, at any rate,” Eden remarked crossly, remembering how Max had also fingered her hair. Though he might have made her nervous, his touch had not annoyed her.
    â€œ Excellent, wonderful!” Master Clavell was oblivious to his client’s sensibilities. “Now,” he began, suddenly more businesslike, “a center part, then high curls on either side of the forehead—We’ll have to do some snipping—there’s really more hair here than we can handle.” He clicked his fingers, and a youth wearing a powdered wig so large that it seemed to be wearing him, rushed forward with a long pair of shears.
    â€œ Stop!” ordered Eden, leaning as far away as she could in the chair without falling on the floor. “Don’t you dare cut off even one tendril!”
    Master Clavell was shocked. “You’ll lose the effect, you’ll look positively frizzy, like some Nubian attendant in a pasha’s seraglio! It’s unthinkable!”
    Somehow a compromise was reached. Eden permitted a few discretionary snips, while Master Clavell altered his basic design to accommodate more hair than he felt was necessary.
    â€œ It is your choice,” he pouted, but when the coiffure was completed, Master Clavell grudgingly admitted that Eden looked quite comely. “I suppose,” he remarked, hand on chin as he studied her reflection in the mirror, “it does say something about the inner you. A bit of a rebel, eh?”
    â€œ Perhaps.” At least he hadn’t said “bumpkin,” Eden thought as she scrutinized the courtly styling. Indeed, she looked most fetching, with the gleaming claret curls piled at her temples and the long coiled tresses trailing over her shoulders and down her back. “Can Elsa manage this?”
    â€œ Ja, ja ,” replied Vrouw de Koch, “Elsa can manage anything with hair. Like a good baker, just give her the ingredients and she makes wonderful concoctions.”
    Relieved that she wouldn’t have to learn the art of hairdressing along with everything else, Eden collapsed on the bed after Master Clavell and his assistant had departed. The day’s activities had left her keyed up. She was restless in the sudden vacuum of activity and wanted to go for a walk, but it was growing dark and had started to sleet. She wondered when Max was coming home, and realized with a sense of shock that she missed him. Never in her life, with the exception of waiting for Gerard coming home from the war, had Eden anticipated anyone’s return. Aimlessly, she began to walk through the house, her ears attuned for the sound of Max’s voice or the tread of his boots in the hallway.
    The main floor consisted of a handsome drawing room with lovely old Flemish tapestries, a dining room in the Italian style that could seat no more than twenty, the kitchen area, which Eden avoided, a study with finely bound books in tall oak cases and a small parlor with a trio of wonderful landscape paintings. She admired the pictures for some time, particularly a snow scene in which rosy-cheeked children skated on the ice and a portly gentleman tumbled downhill after his runaway dog.
    Upstairs she paused at the first of two doors. The one at the end of the hall must belong to