The most striking thing about the room, when she entered on that particular morning, was the heap of bridal fabrics from Lord & Taylor, which must have been delivered the previous afternoon. The room was simpler than the rest of the house, with wide dark floorboards and a plain metal frame for the fireplace. The wallpaper was an earthy brown with a velvet leaf pattern over it. The yards of silk muslin and point de gaze caught all the light and seemed almost to glow from the worktable in the center of the room. There was a note from Mr. Carroll, asking her to approve the fabric and informing her that his assistant would be by in the afternoon to pick it up and take it to his shop on Twenty-eighth Street. She didn’t have a mind for that, however; what she wanted, more than anything, was to talk to her father.
The letters Edward Holland had sent to his oldest child were kept in several of the small drawers in the great mahogany cabinet. She had received crisp white envelopes embellished with the stamps of Japan and South Africa and Alaska, and she kept them all in dated order, each month’s tied together with light blue ribbon. They were full of his quiet observations of foreign peoples and his carefully espoused principles of personal dignity. Her father had traveled a great deal, ostensibly on business, although really he had just wanted to see the world.
Elizabeth opened one of the cabinet drawers and pulled out a stack of letters. Even before he had passed, Elizabeth used to come here sometimes and pick a letter at random, looking for advice or wisdom. She needed that more than ever now, so she closed her eyes and ran the tip of her soft finger along the neatly opened edges of the stiff white envelopes. When she settled on one, she opened her eyes and saw her father’s long, slanting script. She pulled open the envelope, and reread the little note, which must have accompanied some gift or other.
“Remember always to be true,” she read his words in a whisper. “As true and honest as the girl I know.”
A creeping shame set in around her chest bone. So this, she knew instantly, was what her father would have said if he were here. She closed her eyes, and thought how little the words true and honest applied to her now. But perhaps she still had time to change all that.
Elizabeth turned and marched across the hall to the room that once was her father’s study, letter in hand. It was now the room where her mother went every morning, to look over their mounting bills and go through the papers as though she would somehow find a way to make them rich again. Elizabeth leaned her face against the door and knocked.
There was no answer. Elizabeth waited a moment and entered on timid feet. She saw her mother, a figure in black, behind the big oak desk with the burgundy leather top that her father once used. Her mother’s hair, which was always pinned in a dozen places, if not also covered with a hat, was completely loose. It was the same chestnut color as Diana’s, except streaked with white, and it streamed down her shoulders. She glanced up from her letter briefly and wished her daughter a good morning.
“Mother,” Elizabeth said as she tiptoed into the room.
“I’ve got to talk to you about this wedding.”
Her mother nodded for her to continue, but she kept her eyes on the letter in her hands.
“I have been thinking about what Father had wanted for us, about how he lived his life, and how he expected us to live ours. I was reading through his letters this morning, and I came across one in which he urged me to stay true and honest. And when I think about it, marrying Henry Schoonmaker would make me neither of those things.” Elizabeth waited for her mother to say something, but she barely even moved. “I think Father would have wanted me to marry for love,” she went on, in a shaky voice. “And though I am deeply flattered by Mr. Schoonmaker’s interest in me, and while I am very sensitive to his position in the world, I know I do not love him at all. I don’t think I will come to love him either.”
Mrs. Holland leaned back in her oak-and-leather chair, but still did not lift her eyes from the piece of paper to look at her daughter. She pressed her lips together, but otherwise remained completely still. Though she had never been a beauty, and had aged considerably since her husband’s death, Elizabeth could see the woman who must have so impressed Edward Holland when she was still Louisa Gansevoort. There was a particular authority in her every gesture.
“I suppose I should be happy that our servants are defecting, since I can no longer support them. Still, it is painful, especially when he was your father’s valet.”
Elizabeth was so stunned by this allusion to Will that she said the first thing that came into her head. “Mother, what are you reading?”
“It is a letter, child.”
“From who?”
“From Snowden Trapp Cairns, your father’s guide on his trips to Yukon Territory.”
“Oh.” Elizabeth had a vague memory of the gentleman from Boston, who had fair hair and nice manners, despite his mountaineering spirit. “Is it very interesting?”
Mrs. Holland finally put down the letter and looked up. Her eyes were dark and calm, and she assessed her daughter with an almost melancholy stare. “It would be very nice if you could marry for love, my child, and perhaps if your father had not gotten himself killed…” She paused, and the wrinkled skin around her mouth puckered. “But not now.”
“Killed?” The word stuck painfully in Elizabeth’s throat. All of her conviction drained away to make room for this newest misery. “But Father died in his sleep of a bad heart.”
Mrs. Holland threw up her hands. “That was the only way it was possible to tell the story to you girls…and to everyone.” Her eyes drifted sadly. “Your father was very young for his heart to fail, and Mr. Cairns tells me that there was some highly suspicious trading of claims, ones that your father had invested in around the time of his death. Those people are not gentlemen like the Hollands. Prospectors do not come from good families like ours. They are criminals, usually. And your father was caught up.”
Elizabeth thought she might be sick, and refocused all her energy on standing up straight and keeping the rising bile out of her throat.
“It doesn’t matter now, my Elizabeth. Your father made some very ill-advised gambles with his inheritance, I am afraid. He may have wanted you to marry for love, but he also would not have wanted his family to be destitute. Is that what you want? For your family to be destitute?”
Elizabeth shook her head in a slow, pained motion. She could feel the tears coming again, and already she felt like she had been crying for days.
“Good, because there is really only one thing to do. Your father would have wanted you to think of your family before yourself, Elizabeth. It is what our kind of people have always done.” She lifted her chin now, and her voice rose slightly to make her position clear: “You must marry Henry, Elizabeth. You will not be my child if you do not.”
Thirty Seven
Miss Carolina,
It was a pleasure to meet you. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.
I noticed you went out in your old walking shoes yesterday. I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of getting you a new pair.
Yours,
Tristan Wrigley
WHEN LINA WOKE, SHE FOUND HERSELF IN A COLD sweat. Her head ached and there was a wretched hum behind her eyes. She was in a bed, but it was substantially wider than the one in her hotel. The ceiling was made of bare wood boards, and there was only one narrow, grimy window overlooking a downtown cobblestone street. She tried to recall how she had come to be in this unfamiliar place, but all she could conjure was a dark saloon filled with blurry faces and her own uncontrollable laughter. Soon after that she remembered Tristan, and the scene in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the fact that she had walked out into New York yesterday with every cent of her recently acquired fortune.
She clutched her chest, and then bolted out of the bed. She was still wearing Penelope’s old bloomers and corset, and found her things piled on the single, unvarnished wooden chair. Her purse rested on her neatly folded red dress—not a single bill had been removed—w
ith a note perched beside it.
She read the first bit with only foggy comprehension—what was it that he was going to take care of exactly? The part about the shoes was very clear, however. Lina’s shame-making boots were gone, and in their place were a pair of shiny black patent-leather lace-up shoes, with low wooden heels. They were as polished and new as anything in the Hollands’ closets. For a moment she could concentrate on nothing but them.
She slipped them on and stepped lightly across the room, wearing nothing but her corset and bloomers and her brand-new shoes. She had never had anything that fit so well. She imagined how her future as a society lady would be filled with nothing but custom-made dresses, and elegant slippers, and how there would be a wedding to Will Keller, who would have made his fortune out west by then. For a moment she was filled with delight, but then some logical thinking broke through into her stuffy head, and all of her good feelings began to turn quickly to shame.
She was prancing around a near-stranger’s barely furnished room, wearing nothing but her former mistress’s former friend’s undergarments. Yesterday she had had the chance to be a lady, and instead she had gotten drunk in the wrong part of town and now here she was, waking up in a strange room with a spotty memory of what had gone on the night before. Lina despised herself for having fallen so quickly, and so far, off her intended path.
She threw on her dress, took her purse and the note, and left as quietly as possible. She found her way down a slender tenement staircase and onto the street, all the while wondering how anyone could be so easily duped. Tristan had taken her for a lady, and she was now painfully aware that she was anything but.
Thirty Eight
Apparently, Miss Elizabeth Holland has forgiven her fiancé, Henry Schoonmaker, for his poor showing during the Dewey holiday, for the wedding date is said by many people in the know to have been moved up, to this Sunday, the eighth of October. Owing to the truncated time for preparation, all manner of florists, chefs, and couturiers are said to be working round the clock to pull off the lavish event. The Holland-Schoonmaker nuptials are looking very much as though they will turn out to be the greatest wedding of the nineteenth century.
––FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1899
“THE GREATEST WEDDING OF THE NINETEENTH century,’” Penelope spat as she walked, at a slow, agitated gait, across the floor of her personal drawing room on the second story of the Hayes mansion. The afternoon was bright and bustling outside. She held Robber close to her chest and kissed his head. “A little bit of hyperbole, don’t you think?”
“Definitely a bit too much,” Buck put in, between drags of a small fuchsia cigarette. “And you know I am an arbiter of all things a-bit-too-much,” he added.
“Oh, please.” Penelope punctuated her dismissal of Buck’s commentary by rolling her large blue eyes. “The point is, it should be my name in the papers with Henry’s, not Liz’s. She is just so infuriating.”
Penelope stomped her foot once and then turned sharply and walked from the west-facing windows to the south-facing ones. Buck crossed one pudgy leg over the other and exhaled. “You know, I am acquainted with that Gallant fellow. Davis Barnard is his name; he’s my mother’s second cousin or something. Maybe we could—”
“But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not presently engaged to anyone, am I?” Penelope was feeling hot and itchy inside her black dress, and impatient with every little thing. Her instinct was to do some violence to the white-and-gold upholstery that decorated the room, but she had not so lost her head as to want to ruin good brocade. Not yet. She sighed, turned back to Buck, and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be short. It’s all so hard…. She more or less threatened me, you know.”
“Really.” Buck inhaled. “How?”
“She said that if I exposed her,” Penelope answered, her voice returning quickly to a near shriek, “it would only end up making me look bad. Me. As though I were the one acting like a whore in the carriage house!”
Buck lifted his light-colored, sculpted eyebrows. “She’s right,” he ventured cautiously. “It will be difficult for you to get Henry if you appear at all related to Elizabeth’s fall, or if you seem to benefit from it. Society does not like an opportunist,” he added with a slight wag of his finger.
Penelope emitted a wounded guttural noise and widened her eyes at her friend. “I am not an opportunist!” she wailed. Robber squirmed in her arms, but she held him firmly to her. She strode back toward Buck and threw herself down onto the couch beside him. A few moments of awkward, heated silence passed, and then Penelope went on as coolly as she could manage: “I couldn’t stand it if she got him. Do you understand? We need a plan—a perfect plan—to ensure that their engagement is broken immediately.”
“We’ll come up with one.” Buck reached out and scratched Robber’s head, and then petted Penelope’s slender fingers.
“She’s coming tomorrow morning,” Penelope huffed.
“How are we going to come up with a foolproof plan in less than twenty-four hours?”
“Penny, you know I’m very good with a plan—”
“She’s just so perfect at everything!” Penelope interrupted. She stood up and dropped Robber into Buck’s lap.
“Everyone thinks so,” she went on, pacing agitatedly across the black walnut. “And meanwhile, behind that act, she was…you know…with the help.” Penelope smiled faintly, as a thought occurred to her. “She probably thought she was doing the Christian thing, giving herself to someone who really, really needed it.”
Buck’s face broke into a sneering little laugh at that. “So, do you think she’ll come in the morning?”
“Of course. She must be scared out of her mind. I would be.” She chuckled mirthlessly as she crossed her arms across her chest and continued to move restlessly across the floor. “You should have seen her face, Buck. She was white as a ghost.”
Buck tipped the end of his cigarette into the ashtray that was held three feet off the ground by sculpted, gold-plated nymphs. He rested his chin on his palm contemplatively, and said, “Well…that’s a good start.”
Penelope’s jaw tightened and she balled her hands into little fists, which she began to shake in frustration. “Of course it’s a good start. It would be better if the next step were outing her as the slut she is. Then everyone would see plainly why she can’t be with Henry, and the world would return to its rightful order. But apparently that would make me look bad.” Penelope let out a little shriek, then collapsed onto the floor and pounded it once with her fist.
Buck stood and lifted her up by her armpits. He gave her a generous smile, his waxy cheeks rising with it, and then said, “You’re going to have to calm down. You’re never going to win if you can’t keep your nerves under control.”
“I know.” She tried to take a few breaths and remind herself how much was in her favor. She leaned heavily on Buck, as they moved to the windows that looked down on Fifth. The avenue’s afternoon parade of slow-moving carriages was on display, with passengers who pretended not to be watching one another, and who perhaps looked up now and then to see if they might catch a glimpse of the finest silhouette in the city. Penelope turned the dramatic curve of her back onto the street below. She hated that any one of those gawking masses below might perceive her as weak. “The idea,” she went on, “that they would move up the wedding just to thwart me—”
“Well, I’m sure it wasn’t just to thwart you.”
Penelope’s eyes flashed at this suggestion. “It is intolerable that I should lose out to Elizabeth!” she screamed. “That a twit from one of those old inbred families would appear to have stolen what everyone—everyone!—knew was mine.”
“Be calm, my dear,” Buck said, rubbing his friend’s shoulder. “We can’t keep going back and forth. We’ve got to come up with a plan for tomorrow morning. We have all the right cards. It’s just a matter of when we play them.
“And
we will,” he told her in a sugared, reassuring voice.
Penelope turned her face into Buck’s lapel, and let her thoughts wander to the episode in Lord & Taylor, trying to pinpoint her rival’s weakness. Instead, she began fixating on Elizabeth’s face, with its trembling chin and its eyes all welled up with self-pity.
Penelope could not cool the rage spreading inside of her. She turned quickly away from Buck and took long strides back to the couch where Robber had been lounging. When she reached him she swept the Boston Terrier up into her arms. He let out a few sharp barks, but still she clung to him. “Whatever it takes, Buckie, we’ve got to find a way. I cannot bear to lose. I would rather see Elizabeth dead than married to my Henry.”
Thirty Nine
If I go, I will remind him of Elizabeth’s feelings, and that no matter how prearranged their engagement may be, the potential for her to become very hurt is quite real. Perhaps I will remind him, too, that it is the impossibility of our ever being together that lends such fascination to each of our meetings. That would be very wise, though I am not sure I believe it myself.
––FROM THE DIARY OF DIANA HOLLAND, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1899
“SO IT WAS NINE AT NIGHT!” DIANA EXCLAIMED AS Henry led her from the side gate, across a gravel drive, and into the greenhouse with its arched glass roof. As the door closed, he turned to her and grinned. She looked into his face and in an instant forgot all the things that she had planned to say.