Donald was nowhere to be seen when Bronagh arrived home from the town, and, heart pounding with the excitement of gatecrashing Doctor Tolliver's mystery contest, she set straight to work on her dress. It was a beautiful confection of silk in various shades of green, a colour she always felt not only reflected her proud Irish heritage, but set off her copper hair in bold contrast. She shed her brown corduroy waistcoat and, with no small amount of relief, unpicked the starched, boned corset and let her bosom inflate back outwards to fill out her undershirt so comprehensively that she worried that it too might be on the verge of ripping asunder. Bulbous beneath faded cream lace and cotton, each turgid breast jousted for occupancy of the sorely outmatched undergarment like two groundhogs in a burlap sack.
'Behave yourselves now,' Bronagh found herself muttering aloud to her breasts as she looked down at the jostling altercation under way before her. To show her breasts who was in charge, she gave her shoulders a brisk shimmy to settle them into their naturally jutting pout. The action sent a strange tingle through her, that began at her pink nipples as the fabric grazed them, then radiated outwards, reverberating through the resonating volumes of her bosom and as far as her every extremity, from her scalp to her toes to right down between her... she tried to ignore this new sensation and returned her attention to the here and now and the task in hand.
There was almost no fabric left to let out, and it was with great care and attention to detail that the young Irishwoman undertook the painstaking task of sewing together the various panels of the dress's upper portion to allow for the the greatest capacity. Bronagh frowned as she concluded that every fraction of an inch by which she increased the amount of room for her bosom reduced the amount of fabric which could be stitched together, which would result in a more fragile assembly. She decided that if her chest had more room to move about, the strength of double-stitching would be less necessary. And she could simply avoid too much chest-heaving by taking smaller, shorter breaths. It would be worth it, though. This dress was too gorgeous not to wear. She'd upstage those nasty women from the town. After all, they'd decided they hated her already, so she didn't seem to have much to lose any more.
She decided to go for an underbust corset. There was no room for anything in the upper half of the dress except her bosom and her bosom alone, not even underwear. Every single nook and cranny within the dress would have to be filled all the way up with breast. The responsibility for the maintaining of a smooth, dignified profile would be carried by the natural firmness and high shape of her bosom itself. As she strapped her lower torso into the boned support garment and tried on the newly-adjusted dress above it, she was satisfied that the way her breasts rose, protruded, and compressed together all by themselves created an illusion of underclothing that would fool anyone. Originally, the neckline of the dress had risen all the way up past her throat as high as her collarbone, but of course that was now no longer feasible, and now the decollΓ©tage swooped from shoulders all the way down to the equatorial expanses of her chest's halfway line. The deep, bulging cleft that extended from below her chin separated two vast domes of pale cream skin which descended, eventually, beneath a narrow margin of lace trim.
'No peeping out,' Bronagh said, growing more comfortable with this habit of addressing her breasts like disobedient pets, but her breasts didn't listen, and within seconds Bronagh could feel the cool breeze of freedom tickle her errant nipples, which slipped upwards into view like pink kittens' noses, buoyed by the balloon-like defiance of gravity which was one of the characteristics that made her breasts such an apparently enviable commodity.
She tucked the naughty nipples back down beneath the trim, but there was no guarantee that they would not make a bid for freedom at what would no doubt be the worst imaginable moment. And even with nipples out of view, the immense panorama of exposed bosom flesh was likely to invite all the wrong kind of attention. Bronagh saw on her sewing table a spare swatch of white lace, six by twelve inches in size. She placed it over the bared twin domes of her upper bosom, creating the illusion of a modesty-preserving undershirt of some kind, and the effect in her reflection pleased her, and so she shrugged her unruly puppies back out of the dress and sewed the panel loosely into place before putting it all back on again to admire the finished design. She was ready to go. Donald, wherever he was, could fix his own dinner.
Taking her hat, she hurried down the stairs to be sure of intercepting the early evening mail coach towards Cannon Town, from which she intended to alight when it passed through the charred remains of the original settlement, but as she set foot in the kitchen, there he was: Donald, darkening the doorway, backlit by the orange setting sun.
'Darling!' Bronagh stammered at last, her pounding heart wobbling her left breast about so much she feared it might betray her otherwise undetectable abandonment of a support garment for her jutting shelf of a chest.
'You look nice,' Donald said in a slurred snarl. He had uttered the same words on their wedding day, which now seemed an age ago in another place and another life. The words then had been tender, sincere and brimming with husbandly pride. But this evening, they sounded at best like an insult, at worst like a threat. He was drunk, as usual.
'I'm going out,' Bronagh replied by way of explanation for her heightened appearance. She wasn't usually this confident with her husband, and she cursed herself for allowing a slight tremor in her voice betray her fear of him. He had never been violent, but she had a feeling where that day was coming.
'You're going nowhere,' the liquor-sodden layabout said, then took a step forward, tripped over the doormat, and flew to the ground, walloping his forehead against the cast iron stove on the way down with a sickening thud.
He was out cold.
Bronagh was too taken aback to react at first. Her emotions were mixed, to say the least. Instinctively, she checked to see if he was still alive, and as she stooped to his side he let out a strange, guttural noise between a moan and a snore. Bronagh stood straight again and looked down at her pathetic, unconscious wreck of a husband. In a fit of anger, she wrestled her wedding band from her left ring finger and threw the cheap metal trinket into the pot of stew on the stove. 'Choke on it,' she hissed, fighting back tears.
Then, without a look back, she fled the house towards the road, where the mail wagon was approaching.