“Miss Carolina…”
She turned, surprised a little at herself for feeling so cool despite the heat of the day and the identity of the speaker—for there was no getting around the fact that he was a threat to everything she had fought her way toward. But it was dark and hush in the lobby of the hotel, and she had spent the last week being courted by an incomparably eligible bachelor. Her belief in her own powers of attraction, in her social grace, had increased tenfold in those seven days. If someone on Wall Street had put everything on her confidence the week before, he could have retired like Carnegie today. Her bee-stung lips gave up only half a smile as she confronted Tristan Wrigley’s golden gaze.
“Why, Mr. Wrigley.” The flat delivery had become part of her charm.
“Can I tempt you with a pot of tea, a pastry, perhaps a late afternoon aperitif?”
His brown waistcoat and white shirt were similar to the ones he’d worn the day they first met—she had been running from the concierge, and he had been leaving his job at Lord & Taylor, and they had collided on the sidewalk right there in front of the hotel. She did not like to think of it anymore, but what followed had been rather dissolute. When, on Wednesday, she had received the note from Tristan, it had momentarily conjured all her old gauche selves, along with several helpings of shame. But then she had noticed his unschooled handwriting, his rather clumsy choice of words, and told herself she should not be so worried about making him disappear.
She took a breath to steady herself. “No, Mr. Wrigley, I don’t think you could.”
Placing his hands behind his back, he bent his lean frame forward. It was a chivalrous gesture, but still a few seconds passed before it began to dawn on her that—though they were meeting because Tristan claimed he’d been cheated of a portion of her fortune—he was flirting with her.
“This is business, after all,” she added coyly.
“As you wish.” Smile lines emerged under his high cheekbones, and a twinkle passed in his hazel eyes. Then he swept his hand forward, like he was showing her around the glove department, and they moved together to the patterned velvet sofa best sheltered by potted palms.
She perched on the seat, her shoulders thrown back and her hands primly on her knee. Sweetly she began: “You feel you are owed something.”
“We both know you would be back to working as a maid, or far worse, if I hadn’t intervened,” he answered in the same charming tone.
“Mr. Longhorn knew very well what I was, and still he thought I should be taken care of.” She let her eyes drift to her skirt, and for a moment she stroked the fine fabric. When she spoke again, some of the sugar had gone from her voice. “But then, I know what you are, and I think you should be taken care of, too.”
Now she turned in her seat to look at him straight on. He had been gazing at her, and she wondered briefly if the desire he’d felt for her the night he pressed her against the wall of that elevator had grown a little unbearable, now that she was such a polished version of herself. “I knew you would not forget me, Carolina.”
“Perhaps you should tell me what kind of figure you had in mind.”
He placed his elbow on the back of the sofa so that he almost might have draped it round her shoulders, and brought his mouth close to her ear. The lobby hummed with the low sounds of elegant hospitality, and bellboys pushed brass carts back and forth across the thick, wine-colored carpets. A few guests lingered by the front desk, but as she had suspected, there was no sign of anyone from her circle anywhere near what had only once been the best hotel in the city. He exhaled and then whispered a sum that, half a year ago, would have sounded so impossible as to be hilarious, but which now to her only represented a moderately decadent holiday. After all, she was a girl whose total earnings in a year as a lady’s maid could not have bought her the suit she’d been buttoned into that morning.
She tipped her head so that her hat obscured the expression on her face, and then stood wordlessly. By the time her chin rose, exposing her features to Tristan, she had made them stony. His mouth opened, a dull, dark slot, and he watched as she extended a gloved hand.
“I will have a check made out to you for just that amount, and it shall be delivered to you at Lord and Taylor before the end of the day.”
“Could you have it instead delivered to me at my apartment?” he asked, a little too quickly. Then she knew that he had debts and needed the money badly, and soon, and that he didn’t want his employers or anybody else knowing about it. There was something hopeful and a little pathetic about him that she’d never noticed before.
“Of course.”
In moments it would be over, and yet she found that she was in no hurry to leave. It was as though, now that she was winning, she didn’t want the battle to be over already. She straightened her spine, and let her fist rest against her waist, proudly. This was a pose, and she had a sudden flash of how flattering the chandelier light was on her handsome figure.
“You look awfully pretty, Miss Broad,” Tristan grinned. He was relieved, too, she guessed.
The compliment sent a girlish sensation washing through her, and she found herself wanting to say a sentence that had been brimming on her tongue for days, but for which she hadn’t found the ideal listener.
“What is it about you?” he pursued.
The smile that followed was involuntary, and she couldn’t help the words that came out of her mouth next. “I’m in love,” she very nearly whispered. “It gives a girl a certain something, isn’t that what they say?”
Tristan’s eyebrows levitated, and in the following seconds Carolina felt very tawdry for even having mentioned her blooming romance with Leland while in the same room as the salesman who had known her at her worst. “Are you now?” he replied in a manner more sly than chivalrous. The snakelike slenderness and the coiled way he carried himself were again obvious. “With that Bouchard fellow?”
She cleared her throat and stepped away from him, trying to summon her late hauteur. But her nerves had returned. “You can expect that check, Mr. Wrigley. I don’t imagine we shall see one another again.”
Quick as she could, Carolina twirled about and strode for the exit, suddenly wanting for that last bit to be true more than ever before.
Fourteen
Diana Holland—she of the newly shorn hair, she of the storied starry eyes—will step off a ship originating on the Continent and into the waiting arms of her native New York today. Welcome home, Lady Di.
——FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE
NEW YORK IMPERIAL, FRIDAY, JULY 13, 1900
“OH, NUMBER SEVENTEEN!” DIANA REQUIRED A DAINTY twirl to fully bring herself back into the room where so many of the important transactions of her life had taken place. All the details were the same—the embossed olive leather wall panels, the stained and carved wood ceiling, the Turkish corner heaped with pillows—but the overall effect seemed rather old to her after her travels, a mite dusty, and somewhat small. “I am seventeen now, too,” she added with a giggle.
“I am your mother.” Mrs. Holland, stationed by the tall, street-facing windows, employed a cold tone. “I am well aware how many years you’ve walked God’s earth.”
The house stood on the enclosed little park, all quiet leafiness, which secreted itself between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets and Third and Park Avenues. That placid brown face with its large, watchful windows had provided shelter, as well as a certain understated cachet, to three generations of the Holland family. Diana’s father, Edward, had been born there, and his younger sister, Edith—now occupying a sofa in the outer edges of the first floor parlor—remained a full-time occupant. The pocket doors still whined and stuck in their tracks, except perhaps somewhat less than before Diana had gone, for the brief poverty the Holland family had experienced last fall appeared to have passed, like a bad winter. It was difficult for the youngest member of the family to determine exactly how. In any event, the lady who was born Louisa Gansevoort, and then married Edward Hol
land at the rather ripe age of twenty-five, was looking petite, as usual, but had reclaimed some of the steeliness of posture which she had once been known for.
“Where’s Claire?” Diana asked, noting an unfamiliar maid, who appeared almost too thin to lift a tea tray, cowering in the hall in a plain black dress.
“Who?”
“Claire Broud,” Diana replied indignantly, for Claire, besides being a very genuine and soft-hearted person, had worked for the family for years, and was in fact the daughter of the Holland girls’ childhood governess. The faux ignorance her mother had just indulged was nothing more than an exercise in status maintenance.
“She moved on,” Mrs. Holland returned sharply.
“Oh.” Diana’s eyes darted to the place where her hands now came together, as regret stuck in her throat. She knew that Claire had felt guilty over telling Diana’s secret, and the terrible consequences that had stemmed from its reaching Penelope. But Claire could not have intended harm, she never intended anyone harm, and there was no way Diana could hold a grudge against her. Only—she now realized—she had never told her so.
“In any event,” her mother went on coldly, “I do appreciate this trick you’ve managed, of setting up a false story in the papers in advance, to explain your absence and conceal your peregrinations—your sister never thought to do so much….” Diana, close to the unlit fireplace, raised an eyebrow as her mother paused to examine her hands. For Elizabeth, when she had run away, had covered up her absence, and in a rather more extreme way: She’d made everyone believe she was dead. Their mother smoothed the rust-colored chiffon jacket, which she wore over a long black skirt; in the months since Diana had slipped out in the night, her mother must have ceased exclusively wearing widow’s garb. The widow’s cap, too, was gone, but this only exposed the fact that her dark hair, drawn up in a low bun, was streaked with gray. “I have talked to Mrs. Pennington Gore and old Granny Newbold and Odette, the manicurist, and nobody seems to be any the wiser to your ruse. That is some relief to me. But the worry you have caused”—emotion wavered, briefly, in her voice—“you have no idea.”
Diana, in a dress of light blue chambray, which was fastened with a brown leather belt and ballooned airily around her arms and legs, moved forward through the old Bergère chairs arranged with affected carelessness across the faded Persian carpet. She had borrowed some of Henry’s pomade, and her hair was now parted on the side and greased so that a dark section half covered her forehead and then ducked behind her ears, like a bullfighter’s. The sensations within her were light and free. All her being wanted to run great distances, or drink vast quantities of wine, or speak too loudly, or dance for hours. She had successfully made herself far more interesting than any heroine in any novel—but she had not meant to cause her mother pain.
“I would have told you,” she ventured sweetly, “but I didn’t think you would have let me go.”
Mrs. Holland turned sharply from the window, her onyx eyes shining. Aunt Edith, wearing white and cream seersucker, as well as features uncommonly like Diana’s, smothered a giggle with the back of her hand. “You are correct on that score,” the former snapped.
“And, you see,” Diana went on, undaunted, “I knew it was absolutely necessary that I—”
“I will determine what is necessary for you!” Mrs. Holland was not a large person, but she was capable of tremendous vocal force. In a slightly quieter, but no less fearsome tone, she went on: “You are a child, you could not possibly know what is best for you. You are willful—but that is my fault. There was none of the usual tutoring, the finishing, a girl like you requires. If you have turned out a little wild—and clearly you have—then I must take the lion’s share of blame.”
The sweetness began to fade from Diana’s face. She had expected this, of course, but she had traveled so far beyond her mother’s petty concerns about propriety that she no longer knew how to respond.
“Mrs. Cairns has agreed to talk to you, tonight, at her new home—”
“Elizabeth!” Delight was resurgent within Diana. “Are we going there tonight?”
“Yes,” her mother answered duskily, “because she is going to tell you how you must behave. Edith and I will accompany you. After that you will not leave this house until I deem it acceptable. And that will not be for a good long time.” The stern tone was almost laughable to Diana, and she knew that amusement was visible in her coloring. She tried to turn her face away, toward Edith, with whom she’d always shared a girlish, unspoken understanding, but her mother sensed her rebellion. “And when that time comes, I will be your chaperone.”
The afternoon light was slanting in through the windows on so much cherished, hoary bric-a-brac, showing it for what it was, just as the antiquated beliefs that Mrs. Holland clung to assumed a sheen of the absurd under Diana’s bright, hard gaze. In a second or two she had seen that the old lady’s methods of coercion were nothing more than postures of intimidation, and all her fixations with propriety were but nonsense spoken into a brisk wind.
“I’ve worked in saloons and slept in barracks!” Diana threw her head back and put a defiant hand to her hip. “I can’t even begin to imagine wasting my days fixating on embroidery, reading bible passages, day in, day out.”
Mrs. Holland stepped away from the window on tense, fast moving legs, a long index finger cocked at eye level. “If you mean to suggest that—”
“I mean to suggest—I am suggesting—I am saying—that I am home for now, but don’t expect me to wait for you to grant me permission before I do any little thing.” Diana adjusted the collar of her dress, which formed a V over her chest, and inhaled to soften her voice. Then she offered a steady, almost wistful sounding justification: “I just couldn’t live like that now.”
Mrs. Holland’s thin upper lip curled back over her top teeth. “You will go to your sister’s with me tonight.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Yes?” The acid in Mrs. Holland’s tone was trenchant enough to make Diana’s stomach unquiet, and for a moment she wondered if she really was brave enough to act on all her big talk. But in the next instant she knew she’d called her mother’s bluff, and that nothing would ever be the same.
“Yes, I’ll go to Elizabeth’s tonight. But first I am going to pick out some flowers for her. At the shop on Broadway. By myself.”
Diana held her mother’s gaze, lightning playing over her chocolate-colored irises, and for a moment both women wavered there, amongst antiques that were the product of fifty years of the Hollands’ collecting impulse. Her mother was stunned or furious or both, it was impossible to be certain, and Diana did not wait long enough to find out. She smiled wide and frank as she turned to leave the room.
Overhead, in a perfect blue sky, white clouds drifted, lazy and still in the heat. The façades of Broadway strained upward in their direction, with dollhouse-white columns and cornices, and row upon row of windows framing curious scenes. Signage blared from on high, and canes clicked against the sidewalk. The day was coming to a close, and the people in the street idled there as though they were too relieved just to be free of stuffy rooms to move with any kind of purpose. Diana charged through the crowds, full of joy to be out on the street, in her own city, by herself, and to no longer care who witnessed this indiscretion.
The chambray dress was old—it had been hanging in her closet at No. 17 since the Indian summer of 1899—but she wore it differently now. That shade of worker’s blue set off her recently browned skin, and the looseness slavishly flattered the curves of her body. Everything was like that to her just then—familiar, but as though she were seeing it for the first time with all new eyes.
I am the mistress of a married man, she thought to herself as she made her way up Broadway. The phrase gave her insides a pleasant floating sensation. If a passing stranger had asked her to identify herself, she wondered if she could help that being the first response out of her mouth. I am the mistress of a married man, she thought again, and flexed her cheeks
in private happiness as she entered the glass storefront of Landry the Florist’s. Inside it was all tiny white hexagonal tile and mirrors etched with gold. She inhaled air redolent with petals and pollen, and searched out lilies, which were Liz’s favorite.
A great cluster of pillowy magenta peonies, in an elaborate arrangement stationed next to the brass till, commanded her attention instead. She had never seen peonies that color.
“What are those?” she asked, approaching the girl behind the gray marble counter.
“Those?” The girl, who could not have been much older than Diana, looked innocently at the gaudy bouquet. Then her face underwent a series of transformations that had become familiar to Diana during her brief tenure as a gossip scribe: First her eyes grew wide with the secret knowledge she had just been reminded of, after which her brow grew together in guarded determination not to divulge, and, at last, her features relaxed with the happy, impulsive decision to go ahead and spill. The girl put her elbows on the counter, and leaned forward. “Those are for the younger Mrs. Schoonmaker, whose husband just came back from war—but can you guess who they are from?”
The name had caused Diana all kinds of anger and pain, but just now she found it overwhelmed her with curiosity. “No—who?”
“Not her husband at all, but the prince of Bavaria, who is a guest at the New Netherland! And it’s not the first time, either. He has a standing order for a bouquet just like that to be sent to her every day!”
“No!” Diana feigned chummy shock. “Are Mrs. Schoonmaker and the prince particular friends?”
The girl drew her mouth down from her nose, and her brow rose high above her eye sockets; she opened her palms as if to say, Who knows? and then added, as though it explained everything, “They say they danced together at Carolina Broad’s house opening.”